End Online: Volume 5
Page 19
“Yet the ice shield was unaffected. Any ideas?”
“None.”
Chronix’s spell is also still operating, his voice entering the dome as he sends orders to all the players encircling the shield, “Draw your weapons and break through it! Anyone with fire magic, use that! Where are the people Lost set on fire? They are basically human torches for melting ice!”
‘Sorry Chronix, the dire flames aren’t very hot,’ I hold back laughter at Chronix’s currently hopeless situation.
Chronix had thought he was prepared for everything and killing me would be just like following a script. But Fen’s ice shield had proven to be much more difficult to deal with than he anticipated. Well, honestly I am equally surprised.
I can hear the sounds of weapons and spells crashing heavily onto the outside of the barrier, but there are no cracks or signs that they are about to break through.
“Focus your attacks on one location!” Chronix’s voice echoes through the dome, followed by what sounds like voices further away asking for what locations.
Shortly after Chronix’s last order, the sound of the players trying to break through is concentrated on six locations throughout the dome. They are equally separated but there is a large enough gap in between to escape through.
“Fen, can you open a small door in the barrier while leaving the barrier?” I suddenly have an idea for escape.
Fen simply nods her head in response, “…Yes.”
Excited, I turn to Verde and Sir Laurence and gesture toward the back of the dome in good humor, “Ladies and gentlemen, if you will turn your attention to that section of the wall, we will shortly be escaping this current bombardment and reaching safety.”
When they look at me confused, I clear my throat and explain my plans, “Fen and I will carry you both so we can escape as quickly as possible. Fen will create an opening in the barrier for us but we have to quickly get out and get as far away as possible before they notice us.”
Verde and Sir Laurence look at each other indecisively. I am certain they are currently concerned with being carried to safety, Sir Laurence more so than Verde. They eventually agree, considering it is the only escape we have. I have them take off any armor and just wear plain clothing to reduce as much weight as possible.
Sir Laurence’s complaints instantly stop when he is picked up by the beautiful and immodestly dressed Fen, though. I know he knows better than to make a move on Fen, but I sincerely hope he isn’t stupid enough to try it anyway.
I pick up the blushing Verde with a princess cradle again and follow Fen in charging at the rear of the dome. One of Fen’s feet stomps on the ground when we are near and a full door sized block of ice soundlessly splits out from the barrier and collapses inwards.
There is absolutely no one outside where we escape and we successfully break the encirclement. We run for a couple of minutes without being bothered by Chronix.
“Lost! Be careful, there are arrows coming from behind!” Verde warns while looking over my shoulder.
I twist my neck so I can see the arrows, but only view a couple out of the corner of my eye. All I can do is run as fast as I possibly can.
I’ve outrun the players, but this volley of arrows is inescapable. Dozens of arrows rain down on us, three landing as hits and taking me down to half health while a fourth hits Verde.
Furious shouts sound from the hills behind us as we finally reach the outskirts of the forest and quickly disappear within. Fen and I let Verde and Sir Laurence onto their two feet now that we’re beyond danger.
“How the hell does he keep finding us?” I scour my mind for answers but come up empty.
Sir Laurence gives it some thought before answering with one of his more serious answers, “Normally I would suggest a spy, but considering the high class scroll he wasted on something so trivial, he probably burns through location scrolls like there is no tomorrow. We also all transported back to Iceridge, making it easier to track us down.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s true.”
Silently, we begin walking through the trees until night is upon us.
“It’s late in the real world and despite sleeping in the game, I am still weary. I will be logging off to rest,” Verde informs everyone, preparing to log off.
Just as I am about to do the same, an idea comes to mind, “I also need a break. I was thinking, we still have a while before any fighting to defend the city happens and we are trying to dodge Chronix, how about we don’t log in tomorrow and meet up in real life like we were talking about?”
Sir Laurence agrees without complaint, but Verde gives it a lot of thought, trying to work out the solution to some problem, “Tomorrow? Yes, I think I can do that! Where shall we meet? We were meeting in downtown because Lost can’t travel too far, right?”
We stay online for another hour before we decide where to meet. Fen looks at us sourly as we discuss meeting in real life where she cannot go. She remains in a bad mood and ignores me until we log out, where after she traps me in my locker unable to log out for another hour before I convince her that what she is doing is wrong and she needs to not do it.
Outside of virtual reality, the thought of meeting everyone in real life makes me incredibly nervous and unable to sleep. I eventually fall into a slumber, but I know I will awaken extremely tired with a lack of sleep.
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-Chronix-
I am sitting in the grand conference chamber of the Swords of Light guild in Iceridge. Tapestries and paintings hang on the wall; each and every one of them is new. The solid wood table in the center of the room is the same as usual, but the twelve people sitting around it are not the same people that previously did.
The Swords of Light guild has had massive changes based on my decisions. All the previous members have long since been expelled and replaced with new players. The entire line up of our guild is new, as is our new general purpose. These new players are all a part of the new Swords of Light guild because they are players who share the same thoughts. Of course, those thoughts are in regard to Lost and his party.
Looking at the first seat on the right hand side of the table, I glare at a man with long brown hair and the looks of a woman. He wears light armor and wields two short swords. He said this is the new Speed King player build that is supposed to be becoming more popular lately.
“What the hell was that? Do you realize how much I paid for the ‘Heavenly Dispelling’ scroll?” I shout at the player I had cast the spell, still unsure as to what went wrong.
“It should have dispelled it but it completely ignored the barrier. The only possible explanation is that barrier wasn’t actually a spell but instead a part of the environment.”
“What the hell do you mean a part of the environment? We’ve all studied Mason’s videos profusely; we know all of their strengths and weaknesses. Fen, that wolf girl, or whatever she is, summons ice and uses it to attack and defend. We have a large list of all the types of attacks and defenses she uses.”
“Yes, but that barrier must have been different. What if she in fact just raised the ice from beneath the ground and let it settle there. We can’t dispel the environment.”
“That was a triple layered barrier of hard packed ice that even high intensity flame magic could not melt. She also created a door in it which they used to escape from. It can’t be that.”
“I’m sorry, that’s the only explanation any of us can come up with.”
“I recorded the battle, everyone, study this recording and learn from it. We don’t want to mess up again, understood?”
“Understood!”
Using a projector that can only be bought for a guild with real life money, I project the battle onto the far wall of the grand conference room. The battle does not last for a long time, but is replayed frequently, especially at the point where the ice barrier is formed. Yet no matter how much we study i
t, we can’t figure out the secret to it. The only solution for quickly breaking it we have, is to lure a boss monster to instantly crush it.
“Guild leader, what about our spy? Could he discover the secret of this?” A female member with long blonde hair in a ponytail hanging over one shoulder and the freckled face of someone from the country asks curiously.
“It’s possible, but we don’t want to make them too suspicious. I will pass on that if he can find out it will be best, but not to press too hard for information.”
Chapter 35: Assault, Grenton
-Mikhail-
“God damn it!” I curse vehemently and throw all the nearby paperwork around in the office shortly after disconnecting the V-Link.
“Mikhail, getting angry about it isn’t going to help,” Henry says as he stands in the doorway watching me with a frown.
I look over at him, trying to use a meditation technique to force the fury in me to calm, “Those arrogant little pricks simply slaughtered us when all I was doing was watching them. Now they messed up our plans!”
“No, you would have teleported to Swordbreak at the end of the hour and been separated regardless. You’re just angry you lost.”
“That can’t be right. I have lost plenty of times before and have never been this mad.”
“It can happen to all of us. Go home and get some rest. You have been logged in for extensive periods lately and we can tell it has taken a toll on you.”
“But sir-“
“Go home, Mikhail. I will see you tomorrow.” Henry cuts me off with a voice that gives me the chills and beckons for me to leave the room.
He is my boss and I have no reason to dispute it, so I oblige by leaving the building with an apology for the mess. Henry doesn’t appear to be too bothered by it and sends two interns in to clean the room.
My anger is still seething on the way home so I make a detour to my local gym, Maver’s Gym. I frequent this gym several times a week on a regular basis, but today is one of my rare spontaneous decisions to go.
Behind the reception desk is a charming lady with fiery red hair and glasses. She usually smells of expensive perfume that draws men in. Perhaps this could be a deliberate marketing strategy to retain customers. She doesn’t do much else behind the desk.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Peryn.” The receptionist gives me a charming smile as I enter the front door.
At this point I would usually flirt with her a little; I find her incredibly attractive, but today is different. I am not in the mood and simply reply with an ‘afternoon’ before swiping my membership card and entering the facility.
I am a high paying member of the gym, and as such have access to the special room out back, the heightened gravity training room. The gravity in this room is artificially increased above standard gravity. The amount changes on a weekly schedule, a notice board in front of the room states that today the gravity is 1.3 times normal.
Before heading into the room, I get changed into a training suit that the gym provides to monitor the body and ensure no injuries take place. The suit is clean, and once I am done I will send it down the laundry chute so it can be cleaned and prepared for the next person to use.
My personal belongings are left in a locker as I enter the HGTR. Stepping inside the room is like stepping onto some amusement ride that uses centrifugal forces to pin people to the walls, only on a smaller scale. I still feel my internals shifting slightly from the sudden change in gravity, but they soon adjust themselves and the discomfort vanishes.
The room is approximately ninety meters square, with countless exercise machines within. Ten people who I have never seen before are currently within the room. I use a free treadmill next to one of them and begin at a low speed which will begin at a walk and gradually increase to a slow jog until I have run a total distance of five miles.
With sweat dripping off my entire body, all the anger inside of me slowly fades away until it vanishes. I do some weight training next and spill more sweat onto the floor, but such is needed to keep the body in perfect shape.
On the way out of the gym, I smile and nod to the receptionist, even flirt a little, but she tactfully avoids all advances from the members of the gym with a precision that would astonish most military tacticians. I don’t know if there is any man in this woman’s life, but he would have to be an incredible person to be able to get her.
The remainder of the night is relatively peaceful, passing before I even realize what time it is. The following morning I feel completely refreshed, prepared for a new day. I begin work at 9:00am but arrive twenty minutes early and run some diagnostics on Xilbril. Information on Lost and his party still eludes me, but I am confident I will be able to uncover something eventually.
“Excuse me, Mikhail.” One of my co-workers, Klyde, pokes his head through the door of the server room and calls out to me. “Henry is gathering all the brass in the meeting room and would like you to be there.”
“Thanks, Klyde, please let Henry know I will be there shortly.”
“Sure! I will let him know now!”
Klyde rushes out of the room, leaving the door ajar, and picks up a phone from one of our wired terminals by the sound of it.
I don’t want to take too long, so I leave the server room after performing one more test to get in contact with Xilbril. Walking down the corridor to the meeting room, I can feel the faint familiar drumming of the hydrocell generator in the sublevels reverberating through the building.
The meeting room is in the far corner of the building. Morning sunlight spills through the two walls made of floor to ceiling windows. In the center of the room is a single round table with ten seats positioned around it. The seven directors of Idea Imagine are currently all sitting there, inspecting various reports and documents with the occasional question or chatter. Henry is also already here, as he is one of the seven directors.
They all turn to me as I walk in and hesitantly sit down, occupying one of the three remaining seats. A small pile of reports are slid over to me, which I quickly look over. Many of the reports are from me on the current situation of Xilbril and the AI children currently within the game.
Henry is the first to look up from his paperwork and speak to the group. “As you can all see, the problem of AI children has escalated to a whole new level. We need to come to a decision in regard to what we should do about the situation.”
“My concern isn’t these children that have been roaming about the virtual world; to ordinary players they are only boss monsters that cannot be killed and end up giving up after a few deaths. The problem is this one AI: Fen,” a wizened man in his late seventies says as he stares at Henry and me with a gaze as cold as ice.
One by one, the other directors speak their minds, asking for clarification of how the situation became like this.
“This Fen AI. My concern is that she is female.”
“Why is that your concern? Shouldn’t we be more worried about how close she has attached to a human player? We are all aware of their capabilities.”
“Every AI that Xilbril spawned from herself to date has been male. This is the only female to have appeared. I’m worried she will also spawn off a set of AI children and spread.”
“If she does, we will be able to determine the origin of those AI and determine Fen’s location on the server.”
“What if she’s not on the server?”
“Preposterous! There are filters and firewalls in place that will prevent that. In addition, there is no storage device connected to the server large enough to hold such a large entity as an AI.”
“The second generation V-Link helmets would make it possible.”
“Still impossible, the entity would have to break through the equivalent of a three meter thick steel reinforced wall to leave the server. It couldn’t be done.”
“So where is this AI then? One of the reports here states a program leaving the server to an external source. This could be the very same AI we are chasing down.”
“I can see it here in the report; Hollis Sylvester, Verity Lee, Markus Forz, Maver Marx and Malt Marx. So far, we only have names and basic information, but we know more about them every day.”
“With their real names, it is only a matter of time. Henry, what is it?”
“Sir, Verity Lee is the daughter of Sidney Lee, the director of Lee Investment Partners. As it states a little further in the report, there was an incident relating to our system that gave her amnesia. Whatever caused this is dangerous and a serious liability, we are in a race against time to prevent something similar happening on a larger scale. She has been entering the game and collecting information from the party to aid us.”
“She was aiding us. Even I can tell from the latest information that she seems to have stopped cooperating. If she wasn’t the daughter of Sidney Lee, we could be a little more forceful. What about the others? What information have you uncovered?”
“Markus Forz: recently ascended his father’s position as the CEO and director of Foster Electrical and Homewares; a multinational conglomerate that would be difficult to pressure. Maver and Malt Marx: two brothers from the slums who are perhaps flying too close to the sun with wings of wax. Hollis Sylvester: this person...”
“We have no information on him. No matter how much we search, he is like a ghost. He is also the one the AI attached itself to and the person of the most importance. Why do we still have nothing on him, for Christ’s sake?”
“The Sylvesters are a family originally from the middle district, fallen to the lower district a good twenty years ago. We acquired the family tree from their archives and even consulted several of the family members discreetly, but no one knows about a Hollis Sylvester. We are searching through driver’s license databases and other authorities, but Xilbril has managed to extend her influence out of the server and interfered with our searches.”