Distortion (Somnia Online Book 5)

by K. T. Hanna

  A wave of relief fluttered through the chamber and slowly the soft bioluminescent glow increased, lighting the whole chamber in a subtle way. Murmur almost wished it hadn’t. It only made the limbs protrude more, and the eyes attached to nothing else grew eerier as they all focused onto the group like they were waiting for them to make a mistake.

  “Thank you.” The booming voice had lost much of its volume, and as Murmur watched, a tiny gnome, smaller than any she’d seen in-game before, made his way toward them. From deep in the chamber where darkness still lingered, he walked with purpose.

  “All who enter here see but one thing. They see a strange mutation of gnome and think to kill us. Our last battle was yet another of these groups seeking to kill foul beasts. But we were once like all others, and the curse eats away at us.” He gestured around, his own green skin glowing softly to lend him an almost ethereal presence. “If you can help my son, we might yet all be saved.”

  Sinister’s eyes sparkled with victory, and Murmur was dying to ask her just what sort of quest this was. But the small gnome spoke further.

  “I am Eon, father of Erichu, husband to Noichu. My wife was cursed and is imprisoned. This brings our son grief so great that he rampages through the underground caverns. His rage makes the very foundations of Richnai tremble. It’s all I can do to keep out troublemakers. Please. For the sake of the Richnai gnomes, free my son from his anguish.”

  With a clap of smoke, Eon disappeared. Several pops rang through the air, and the dismembered parts of bodies vanished from the walls and floors, leaving smooth slate tile in its wake.

  Just about to open her mouth to ask where Sinister had got that quest, Murmur stopped when strings of letters appeared across her vision.

  You have been tasked with lifting the Richnai curse. To do so you must free Noichu and battle her captors before fighting through to discover Erichu and relieve him of his anguish. This quest must be completed in order and fully, or else you will fail, and the curse will become permanent.

  You have six Somnian hours.

  “Fuck.” Beastial looked around at everyone, his eyes wide. “That’s a lot to get through in three real hours.”

  Havoc shrugged. “Guess that means we can’t wipe then.”

  “You better have enough coffins on you if we do,” Sinister gritted out determinedly.

  “What if I don’t? Those things are expensive,” Havoc snapped at her.

  Veranol coughed and interrupted. “Expensive? Don’t talk to me about expensive. You have no idea what I have to buy to make sure we have wards. If I didn’t get money from the raids, we’d all be dead.”

  Sinister narrowed her eyes. “Does that mean my heals are worthless?”

  Veranol shrugged. “They are if you haven’t built up reserves and you know it.”

  Mellow’s gaze focused on each person in turn.

  “Enough!” Mellow rarely yelled, and just that one word was enough to shut the bickering up. “There is no need to fight about it. If you want to bitch about who spends the most? Want to know what some of these vials cost before I fill them?”

  Mellow waited, as if daring anyone else to speak.

  “See. None of you do, and I don’t blame you. We have a dungeon to finish in less than three real world hours now, so stop the bickering, for crying out loud. It’s almost making my ears bleed.”

  Havoc and Sinister looked away, and Veranol actually scuffed the toe of his boot. They all looked appropriately contrite, and Murmur hid a smile.

  Sinister spoke softly. “If I complete this quest, I get some really cool shit. We’ll be unstoppable.”

  “Where did you get your quest?” Murmur had to know, glad the tension had broken.

  Sinister scrunched up her face. “You know, I’m not really sure how I got it. I just remember being like level four and venturing into a section of the graveyard in Nocturne. There was a glowing rock on the ground under some grass and debris. You know I like shiny things. So I picked it up and got this quest. Never gave it much thought because it was cryptic as hell. But the moment those doors closed behind us and plunged us into darkness I got a heap of notifications.”

  Murmur nodded, wondering if she should go back through some of her earlier quests, though it appeared they had a built-in alarm.

  “Time’s a-wasting.” Jinna stomped a foot. “We’ve already wasted almost ten minutes.”

  It didn’t sound like much in the grand scheme of things, but Murmur knew it was. Furthermore, they had no idea what they were about to face. While the area was now lit well, it was so pristine that it made Murmur more suspicious.

  “Any info about what that curse entails for you, Sin?” An idea had suddenly occurred to her. What was the curse, and what did it do—but why had it been inflicted in the first place?

  Sinister frowned, and her vision unfocused from the game world for a moment.

  “Oh.” She looked a bit sick. “They were cursed because Richnai is a different tribe of gnomes. Eon and his wife came from different tribes and thus were forbidden from marrying. Instead of killing them both, the families locked Noichu in a timeless prison, behind walls of anguish and pain. Making her relive torment over and over in a loop. They sentenced Erichu to looped insanity.”

  Sinister gulped, like she didn’t want to let them know the rest.

  Finally, though, she gave in and let them know what had upset her.

  “And they sentenced Eon to watch and be able to do nothing to help either of them.”

  Something didn’t sit right with Murmur. If Eon couldn’t reach out to help the others, then wasn’t the quest in direct violation of that curse?

  “I’m not sure that’s going to work though.” Murmur shook her head, trying to figure out exactly what was annoying her about the whole thing.

  “Oh!” Merlin sounded genuinely excited. “We are already on a quest to prove that we can fight together as a team. By subverting that quest, it has allowed Eon to hijack it for his own purposes without technically violating his own curse and still allowing us to fulfill our requirements.”

  “Sure.” Beastial shrugged. “I don’t really care. We’ve already wasted too much of our time limit, so can we get the hell on with it?”

  Storm Entertainment

  Somnia Online Division

  Game Development Offices

  Early Hours Day Twenty-Four

  Laria rubbed her eyes and glanced at her Wren-monitor to check if her daughter was still online. She was a little bit worried about having left her at home. After the invasion by their sponsors, she wasn’t sure they wouldn’t just bash the door down next time.

  David was on a break for now though. Just a week. It’d have to do.

  Wren was definitely still online and in the Richnai Fortress area. Laria frowned. They’d been in there last time she checked too. They seemed to be in there for longer than she’d anticipated.

  She leaned back and pulled a bottle of water from her small fridge. It was almost empty; she’d have to head out and refill it shortly. Putting her head in her hands, she noticed that she had an email. One of the drawbacks of her position was keeping a clean inbox out of necessity.

  Taking one more swig of water, she sealed the bottle and then opened her mail.

  She frowned at the vision in front of her eyes. The sender didn’t appear to be right. If it was, then it seemed like one of the AIs had sent her email. Before opening it, she made sure she had all of her protections engaged, just in case this was a set up or a way to get the virus into her system and thereby everywhere else.

  And then she clicked it open.

  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.

&n
bsp; Hope you get this.

  Thra

  What on Earth had she missed that Thra could only contact her through this avenue and that apparently Rav couldn’t contact them at all? There wasn’t enough information in the email. Laria needed to know more, she needed to understand why.

  Which only told her how tired she must actually be. Because the first logical step was to locate all of the AIs within the world and see which characters they currently controlled.

  She initiated the search, much along the lines of how she tracked her daughter. While alts weren’t a thing they’d implemented yet, given the way the game allocated classes, she’d designed the tracker with alts in mind.

  Finding Sui’s in-game form wasn’t difficult. He was in the enchanter guild office. Pacing, if her indicators were anything to go by. Laria frowned, wishing she could look closer without getting in-game. But that was part of the beauty and the danger of their AI system. They couldn’t look into their minds; it would make their system too predictable if they got too much even unintentional interference.

  She managed to locate Telvar, who seemed to be locked in his dragon form in the cavern beneath Mikrum Isle. Laria frowned, wishing she could go and help him get out of there. But if her scan was correct, then one of his sub AIs was with him anyway. Which meant whatever he was suffering didn’t seem to be affecting the game world quite yet. At least she hoped so.

  But finding Thra? That was difficult. The normal searches didn’t work for her. She even tweaked them to look into multiple levels inside of the many dungeons in the world. Still nothing. After over half an hour of checking every nook and cranny in the game world, she noticed that Sui was no longer where he’d originally been. Instead, he seemed to be walking through an area that didn’t exist.

  Had she not had him in her sights, highlighted, and tracked, she’d never have noticed it. But she did, and as he pushed through into a section of the game Laria hadn’t even known existed, she got a sudden shiver down her spine.

  If there was one area like this that they’d created on their own, then what was to say that there wasn’t more? Furthermore, it wasn’t only Sui in that space. When whatever door his being there made possible opened, Thra was in the same space.

  It appeared to be an empty pocket of area created beneath what would have been Stellaein. As if it were a secret passageway beneath the office of Belius the enchanter master. That in itself wasn’t a big deal. Not if it had been there originally or intended by design.

  There were many things the AIs needed to be able to do. Expand and contract areas, sure, but it was always within specific parameters. There were always limits on the actual physical construction of the world, because there had to be.

  But this area, it had never been coded by Laria or her team. Which meant that Sui had to have created it himself. It was still a part of the game world and thus subject to the game’s laws, but it was almost impossible to find from outside of the game world.

  That brought up a far more important question. How the hell had he done it? And more importantly, why?

  Considering what Eon had said, Murmur was quite certain that Exodus hadn’t triggered this version of the dungeon. It only reinforced that her decision to level in the dungeons and gain the remaining keys had been the correct way to go. Then, even if they needed to ally with another guild for numbers, Fable could insist on calling the shots because they possessed all of the keys.

  She pulled herself out of her thoughts and barely managed to block the onslaught of small gnomes. Their current opponents were unlike the larger ones they’d battled earlier. This must be where the two factions collided, and Eon must belong to the ones they were currently slaughtering.

  Her stuns felt more powerful with the levels she’d gained. If she hit her Earth Shield first, her power had more guts behind it, and after casting Veto, those damned gnomes didn’t seem to know what hit them.

  The thing was, they also didn’t seem to care. These smaller gnomes threw themselves in groups of five to ten at the Fable raid team with no regard for their own safety. Their skin glowed slightly every time they attacked, and their limbs didn’t seem to be as solid as they should. Almost like they could morph them into anything they wanted to.

  It seemed the second group of their new enemies had learned from the mistakes of the first, who were dispatched faster than Murmur had anticipated. She narrowed her eyes, wondering if they’d perhaps just sent a testing force out to see what their opponents would do.

  Watching the new group that began the charge at them, Murmur noticed they were lagging back and more spread out. Their eyes took up way too much of their face space, and she could have sworn they didn’t blink. They huddled in groups and had a very wide aggro radius. Murmur watched the way they moved, always together, almost functioning as one, like they had a sort of collective mind.

  This time Murmur’s stuns didn’t hit as many of the vicious little guys. Instead, she missed about four of them. And since their limbs could sort of morph, it let them avoid swings or slices to their bodies by effectively twisting or moving their bodies out of the line of attack.

  One of them managed to make it through the front line by vaulting over the top of Devlish’s head in a spectacular show of athleticism and landed behind him, its teeth bared ferociously. Snowy snapped at it and faced off with it until Mellow and Merlin joined in on beating it down. Murmur stood, watching, not sure how to reconcile the well-spoken Eon she’d met with these vicious creatures.

  She could still debuff them, but Veto still sucked up way too much of her mana to do it often, and they had figured out that if they were all clustered, then only a few of them would be stuck in one place. Murmur even attempted to use Annulment, but it seemed as if their opponents didn’t have any buffs she could remove on them.

  Instead, she focused on her sensing nets to try and see what was around them, but all she got back was cluster thoughts. Overwhelming emotions because they were magnified.

  “They don’t only move in packs. It’s like they wait for each pack to die so they can try another tactic,” Devlish observed, his lips pursed in concentration as he watched as the groups huddled in the back, like they were waiting for the current group to finish its part of the experimentation.

  Merlin nodded next to him. “And the blockades along the way are perfectly spaced so that they can attack us in one to two packs at a time, all the while observing our weaknesses.”

  “Almost like they’re funneling us back to something,” Rashlyn murmured as she hugged herself.

  Alarm bells went off in Murmur’s mind, and she wracked her brains, trying to express the thought sitting on the tip of her tongue.

  But Sinister beat her to it.

  “Oh. I think they are trying to funnel us.” She sounded dismayed that she hadn’t thought of it earlier. That she hadn’t realized something written out in plain sight for her.

  Everyone’s gaze was focused on her, but Sinister only bit her lip as she tried to make sense of what her quest said. “They’re funneling us toward the…drain. Because I think they realize what we’re trying to do. Once enter the drain of the fortress, we’ll be in Noichu’s mind.”

  Merlin lowered his bow, even though groups of beady eyes watched them from behind their barricades. “Guess they want us to reach Noichu?”

  “Well, yes.” Sinister hesitated. “But not because they think we’ll help her, it’s because they think she’ll devour us.”

  The drain was no joke. It soon became clear as they battled their way toward it that the chamber was rounded and sloped ever so slightly toward a focal point in the middle.

  As they fought their way through, Murmur didn’t understand why the damned gnomes wouldn’t just let them walk over there if they wanted them to get to the destination so badly. Then again, just letting them walk through wouldn’t have yielded experience they sorely needed.

 
Murmur noticed they were gathering more and more of the wide-eyed gnomes. So many of them. If she mistimed her stuns even once, they were going to be dead.

  Not to put too much pressure on herself or anything.

  She took a deep breath and forced herself to concentrate, ignoring the ache at the back of her head. There was time for that later.

  Veto had been a godsend, or probably would feel more like it when she finally reached fifty and significantly reduced the cost of the spell. The gnomes in their tiny mini army groups still hurled themselves at the raid. Now it seemed like they weren’t too sure if they wanted to let them get through and go down the drain. Maybe they realized the raid might have a chance to do the opposite of what their attackers intended.

  It gave a new feeling to the saying that it was all downhill from here, because while they were going downhill, it certainly wasn’t fast or easy.

  There were just so many of them. While Murmur’s stuns weren’t hitting as many as usual, they were still decently effective. Both Rashlyn and the rangers used their AoE attacks to devastating effect, as did Beastial and Havoc.

  It wasn’t that their opponents did extreme amounts of damage, but there sheer numbers leant a weight their attacks wouldn’t have otherwise had. Instead of being a nice easy way to mow down opponents, AoEing became fraught with danger, and Murmur questioned the wisdom of attacking this way several times, even before she had to use Forestall Death on Rashlyn when she suddenly dropped to almost no hit points.

  The monk came back, groaning with the remnants of pain and muttering under her breath.

  “I know I play with my settings on barely any pain, but I think your spell magnifies them, Mur.” After a second’s pause, she continued. “Thanks for saving my experience.”

  Murmur nodded, but the fights were nerve-wracking. Since the gnomes didn’t come when pulled but attacked at random intervals, Murmur couldn’t get a hold on how best to fight them. They were fast, nimble, and those damned teeth hurt. She knew this because one got a hold of her ankle and left it bleeding profusely when Snowy managed to pull it off. In-game healing was a wonderful thing. Murmur wished she could carry it everywhere.