“I mean that someone’s making him kill these people!” There was finally some heat in her voice, and she advanced half a step. “He’s not doing this willingly, alright?!”
“And how do you know that?” I demanded. I covered the necklace with my boot.
“Because I’m his apprentice,” the girl said, fingers quaking beside her cheeks. “My name’s Rin. And I’m a Developer.”
Chapter 11
“A Dev?” I didn’t drop the Spear point. “Guess that explains the gold ring.”
Rin pressed her lips together in a thin line and nodded, glancing nervously at the blood leaking down my arm. “This doesn’t look very good, does it?”
“No, it really doesn’t.”
“I’m sorry... but I have a quest too.” The girl looked away from me, clutching her arm with the other hand. “I have to find out what happened to make Kanzo do these awful things, and then try to stop it and save him.”
“Save him? What are you, a Jehovah’s Witness or something? The guy’s a serial killer.” I was increasingly unimpressed. “It doesn’t matter how much you like him - he needs a dose of the King’s justice. Besides, you’re a Dev, an Architect. You’re a god above gods in this game. Why the fuck are you intervening in player quests?”
“Because I am a player,” she replied, exasperated. “I worked on the game, and I was supposed to become a Mod, but then Aurora Shard was blown up and the servers reset from the orbital backups... Now I’m just a player until someone from the outside reinstates functioning Mod and Admin tiers.”
I blinked. “There are no Mods in Archemi right now?”
“No. And there won’t be until we re-establish outside contact. OUROS can moderate the game using ASE,” she replied.
“ASE being…?”
“Oh! It stands for Administration and Social Exchange. It’s one of the OUROS slave AIs that regulates NPC and player interaction.” The physical signs of fear began to fade as her speech sped up, flat and a little fussy. “When the game rebooted from SOPHIA-1 and 2, all of the human-controlled Mod accounts were disabled as a safety feature to protect the refugees, because the human element is statistically less predictable than the OURO’s ADEE and the ACE Engines. The risk of cyber psychosis goes up exponentially with externally imposed stressors like, um, global nuclear apocalypse, and… well, any apocalypse, really…”
“Cyber psychosis?” I blinked again.
The Mercurion blushed a bright silvery blue. “... I was babbling again, wasn’t I?”
“You seem to know your shit,” I replied cautiously. Her robot buddies still hadn’t moved. “Don’t suppose you knew a guy named Steven Park?”
Rin brightened a little. “Of course I knew Steven. I didn’t work in his department, though. I, umm, I was part of the Environmental Design Team before I got HEX. He was one of the Core Devs who worked on OUROS. I was just a psycho-social advisor and architectural modeler mostly, umm…”
Rin trailed off shyly, not quite able to meet my eyes.
I sighed, and dropped the spear point at last. This was like trying to hold a puppy at knifepoint. Rin was clearly not a combatant, despite the crossbow-wielding deathbots.
“Keep talking.” I crouched down, and mimed adjusting my boot while I palmed the broken necklace that I’d been trying not to grind against the pavement. “Why are you in Taltos? Place seems kind of racist against anything that isn’t human.”
“I was one of the artists who created Taltos. We based it on old Bohemia, and I worked on, umm, modelling the buildings and base materials and logistics for the region, so when I crossed over, I wanted to settle here and become a crafter. Kanzo is my bonded NPC.”
I squinted in confusion. “Your what?”
“Oh. It’s a crafter thing.” Rin fidgeted in a way that was oddly familiar to me. Fingers pattering, unable to meet my eyes for long periods, social awkwardness… hmm.
“Meaning?”
Rin fidgeted. “When you make a character, you choose between combat and non-combat roles. If you don’t take a combat role, you don’t get the same paths or the same kinds of adventures as combat characters... and you get a bonded NPC who starts you off in your chosen profession. If you’re a farmer, they might be like, your adopted dad or sister or something. If you’re in the sciences or crafting, they’re usually your craftmaster. I’m an craft-specialized Artificer, so…”
“So you got Kanzo.” I sighed, and relaxed my guard. “Come out, Karalti. Stay chill.”
Karalti stalked out of the shadows. Rin nearly jumped out of her skin as the dragon padded over to my side, her head held erect and stiff, tail lashing. While Rin was distracted, I slipped the necklace into a pocket. As I eased down out of combat readiness, I got new updates:
Quest Update: The Slayer of Taltos
After catching the Slayer of Taltos in the act of murdering a priest of Khors, you have discovered his identity: a Mercurion by the name of Kanzo who is a renowned Artificer – and a pacifist exile from Zaunt, the war-torn Mercurion homeland. You would have beaten him, too, if not for those meddling kids.
You have also collected your first piece of evidence for the Volod.
Reward: 502 EXP, Mysterious Necklace [Quest Item], 20 gold Olbia.
As the EXP added, Karalti got an odd expression on her face. The seams of color between her scales glowed brightly. They licked out across her skin, obscuring her in a glowing swirl. She underwent metamorphosis rapidly, and when the colors retreated, she had nearly doubled in size once again.
“Oopsie.” Karalti still had a skinny hatchling look about her, but when she reared her head back, it easily came up to my collarbones. Her round horn stubs now had tiny, sharp, polished tips.
“Oh my goodness!” Rin exclaimed, her fingers fluttering up to her mouth. “She’s beautiful. I... umm... didn’t even see her before...”
Karalti narrowed her eyes, and huffed a spurt of white fire from her nostrils onto the ground. Rin jumped back about four feet. “Weird rubber lady hurt you?”
“Not badly,” I thought back to her.
The dragon flicked her wings along her ribs, pawing at the ground and weaving her head like a snake. “I don’t trust her.”
“I’ve never seen a dragon in the game before!” Rin squeaked. “Did she just level?”
“Yeah, she did. And she’s not too sure about you, which means that neither am I.” Frustrated, I checked Karalti for damage. She was missing about fifteen HP, so I took a Bonebreak Poultice from my Inventory and applied it to her wound. “Look, I have to go report to the Volod about what I saw. You need to come too.”
Rin shook her head vigorously, stepping back. “I can’t.”
“Why?” My tone sharpened again. “Your master’s going to kill again. The King has a right to know.”
“Because this isn’t just about one or two people anymore,” Rin replied. “You said it yourself... Volod Andrik doesn’t like non-humans very much. The Mercurions already live in a ghetto here. The Meewfolk have it even worse. If he finds out the Slayer of Taltos is a Mercurion, he’ll punish all the non-humans in the city worse than he already does. He might even order a massacre.”
I groaned and rubbed the bridge of my nose. Just what I wanted in a role-playing game: genocide. “Great.”
“It didn’t used to be that way... something changed between the end of the history acceleration process and the time I was loaded in,” she added quickly. “This city is very centrally located in Artana, so it was expected that a lot of crafters would set up here and it would become a big market hub. Andrik isn’t even supposed to be the King. The Volod should have been his brother, Ignas, but Ignas committed suicide. I guess OUROS didn’t think we had enough conflict here.”
I thought back to what the High Forgemaster had said about suicide being a disgrace, and the Taltos Archemipedia entry with its bugged out character code. The optimist in me hoped it was a coincidence… a small oversight in the game that hadn’t been corrected once the story had
changed. But I was holding the Spear of Nine Spheres. That was a bug, too – and that bug had nearly been the death of me.
“Apparently, the Architects forgot to account for human nature.” I patted Karalti on the head, rubbing her horn stubs until she began to relax. The predatory focus in her eyes softened, and she crooned and butted against my hand. “Look, we can’t just stand around. I need to investigate the scene of the crime, and at least alert the city guard to what happened at the hospital. And I’m going to find Kanzo and finish this quest. How did you know where he was, anyway?”
“In the last murder, the one in the park... he-he left me a message,” she said, rubbing the knuckles of one hand with the fingers of the other. “A kind of code that we use together in the workshop. My quest updated and told me to meet him here. That’s... that’s how I know he’s not doing this of his own free will.”
“That don’t make no sense,” my dragon grumped.
I was with Karalti on that one. If what Rin was saying was true, then Kanzo had led us straight to his precious apprentice. Rin didn’t seem like a much better liar than she was a combatant, but she was the best lead we had. I was going to push her excuses to their limit. “What could cause him to do something like this?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head miserably, looking down at the ground. “I’m trying to find out. The message he left for me... it was a plea for help. You have to understand - Kanzo is a good man, a good teacher. He’s a pacifist! That’s why he’s in Taltos, and not the head of a House in Zaunt. I-I care about him a lot, and I want to know why he’s doing these terrible things, but I can’t let you hurt him.”
The work I saw going on in the hospital was just about the opposite of anything a ‘pacifist’ was likely to do. I planted the end of my spear on the ground. “Look, the sob story is great and everything, but I can’t just drop this. I’m on a time limit.”
Rin blinked. “I... uh...”
“The fact remains that a bunch of priests are dead.” I jabbed a finger in the direction Kanzo-the-Pacifist had fled. “That guy hasn’t just been killing people. He’s a butcher, and none of those men deserved what they got. I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
“You don’t know if they deserved it or not. But… I guess.” Rin’s small shoulders slumped.
I nearly resumed chewing her out, but then paused for a second. Yes, my first instinct was to argue. My second was to think back to the Order of St Grigori: to Knight-Commander Arnaud, who was so polished and righteous on the outside, and so rotten at the core. The whole Order had been that way, Charismatic to the point of seduction, but built on a lie. What did I know about the Volod, the priesthood of Khors, or the men who’d been killed? Fuck all, really.
I cracked my neck. “How about we set up a time and place to talk more about this? We can’t just stand out here.”
“Oh. Okay.” Rin bit her lip. “How about I give you the coordinates of my workshop? I have to repair Lovelace and Hopper after your dragon… umm… cooked them. Maybe that would help you trust me?”
“Maybe.” But don’t count on it. I eyed the pair of crossbow-wielding killbots. “Lovelace as in Ada Lovelace?”
Rin smiled shyly. “And Hopper as in Grace Hopper. She was a Rear Admiral and one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I in the 1940s, and she popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, which is… ummm… oh, I’m doing it again, aren’t I?”
She blushed, and her cheeks turned a bright turquoise blue. Goddammit. I was starting to think this Kanzo asshole had led me here because he knew there was no earthly way anyone could fight Rin. She was a Scottish Fold kitten in humanoid form. I sighed in defeat. “Which one’s which?”
“That’s Hopper.” Smiling, she pointed at the one Karalti had managed to roast a little more thoroughly. Parts of its armor had melted, and it was walking with a limp. “They’re encoded with different Words of Power. Do you, umm, want to come back with me to the shop? I can send you a Friend Request…”
I hesitated. I was banged up and exhausted. It was close to three a.m. Karalti was already only 14 EXP from reaching Level 3, and I was only about a hundred from Level 10, which was going to be a gamechanger for me. It was the level where I could either take a new Advanced Path, or reuse all of my skill points and redistribute them back into Dark Lancer abilities. I planned to do the latter, because I understood this class a lot better than I had when I first took it. Not to mention, I needed to find Suri and at least do her the courtesy of telling her what I’d discovered.
“I really have to get some crafting supplies, re-gear, and everything.” I held up my spear. “And get this fixed, if I can. It’s down to nineteen percent durability now.“
“Oh my goodness! Is that lazula!?” Rin rushed me, nearly crashing into me as she clasped the Spear. Her eyes were huge and glittering, as if really seeing my weapon for the first time. It put her uncomfortably close to me, so close that I could smell the strange, clean chemical scent of her breath. “Wow, this is an amazing artifact, where did you…?”
Karalti lifted her wings and rushed at her, snapping her jaws. Rin squealed and threw her hands up. She tripped over herself and fell on her ass. “Ahh! Help!”
“Leave it, Tidbit.” I reached out to catch Karalti by the edge of her wing.
“Bad lady!” Her head snaked, and she hissed, drooling white fire from between her teeth. “No touch Hector!”
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Rin wailed.
“Hey, cool it. It’s okay.” I patted my dragon on the neck. She eased down slowly, but her stare bored into my back as I offered Rin a hand up. The Mercurion accepted shakily. “I-I-I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten her.”
“Don’t worry. She’s protective of me.” I swallowed down the laughter pushing at the back of my throat and pulled her to her feet. Like Kanzo, she was heavy – really heavy. Rin was only five foot two and petite, but she weighed at least two hundred pounds. “Yeah, this spear is made of bluesteel. Lazula, whatever it is. I don’t suppose you know how to fix it?”
“No. You need a Level 20-plus Master Artificer with Grade-A Aesari technology knowledge to repair lazula artifacts like this one.” She shook her head. “There’s only one Level 20 Master in Artana that I know of, and he’s… well…”
I facepalmed. “It’s Kanzo, isn’t it?”
Rin nodded, keeping her hands up close to her face. “Yes. But I have B-Grade knowledge of Aesari Artifacts. And this is… this looks like the Spear of Nine Spheres?”
“Yeah, but it’s probably a good fake,” I replied. “The Spear of Nine Spheres is supposed to be soul-bound, and this one’s not.”
Rin’s brows creased. Now that she was closer to me, I could see that her eyebrows weren’t made out of hair. They were filigree lace metal. “That’s strange. Where did you get it?”
“Ilia,” My throat tightened a little. “As part of a World quest from the Court Sorceress, Rutha.”
A strange expression passed over Rin’s face. She glanced at Karalti, who was looking at her the way she’d usually look at a plump mouse. “Rutha of Vasteau? If you don’t mind me asking, is that where you got your dragon? There’s only two places you can take the Dragon Knight class in Archemi: The Order of Saint Grigori in Ilia, or the Lysidian school in Lustria.”
“Door number one. Though I’m not a Dragon Knight.” I edged back cautiously, keeping an eye on Lovelace and Hopper. “And I don’t want to become one. The Skyrdon are fucked up, slaving assholes-“
Rin blinked rapidly. “What?”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. Once the story started, I couldn’t stop myself from blurting it out. “The Skyrdon had the Matriarch – Karalti’s mother – chained up in this pit in the middle of the Eyrie. All the dragons and the knights are bound under this magic spell that basically makes them slaves to the Knight-Commander…”
Rin gasped, pressing her hands to her mouth. “Oh, no.”
“No… no, that’s not how it was supposed to be at all.” Rin caught me urgently by the hand. “We need to go and talk. Now. Follow me.”
The Mercurion’s palm was hot and dry. I paused in confusion. “I thought we were going to put a raincheck on-“
“This is bigger than our quests here,” she said urgently. “Before we do anything else, I need to tell you about a Dev who called himself Ororgael.”
Chapter 12
“His name was Michael Pratt.” Rin was sitting beside a work table, her head resting in one of her slim silver hands. Under light, she wasn’t just adorable – she was gorgeous, a living sculpture with opalescent color dancing through her Valkyrie-like ear wings, her translucent hair, and over her lips and nails. “Ororgael was his gamer handle. Your brother would have known him… They were on the same team, OUROS Neuromorphic P&D.”
We were sitting inside of Rin and Kanzo’s workshop. It took up the entirety of a small warehouse crammed in among the countless shops, machine shops, smelteries and tanneries of the Tanner’s District on the outskirts of town. This was the Mercurion ghetto, and the site of nearly all the city’s factories, mage shops, and artificing workshops. The place was cozy. Half-finished projects littered tables, counters, and rolling tool cabinets. Nearly everything Rin and Kanzo worked on was clockwork, magical, or both. They made watches, carriage parts, and animal-shaped artifacts as masterful as the magitech spider we’d found in the High Priest’s chambers. It was half-garage, half-wizard’s laboratory. The room was dominated by a pair of forges and a small smeltery.
Karalti snored away on a nest of blankets in front of the hot forge. She was now around seven feet from nose to tail-tip, almost big enough to ride. I watched her thoughtfully, cradling a steaming cup of real, honest-to-god coffee between my hands like a precious treasure. It wasn’t necessarily that coffee was rare in Archemi – the eastern and southern parts, at least – but thanks to the Army, I hadn’t had real coffee for years. Conscripts weren’t given coffee in their rations, and it wasn’t served at mess. Not only was it delicious, it gave me a buff to learning Craft skills.
Trial by Fire: A LitRPG Dragonrider Adventure (Archemi Online Chronicles Book 2) Page 10