The thing not only penetrated 10 points of Defense, it also did a huge amount of fire damage and once per day could call down a Firestorm.
“Krogan, I assume you are interested in the axe?” Jace asked, still looking at its impressive stats. As party leader, only he could release items to be looted. It was one of the things that broke immersion, but before they implemented it, looting had been a nightmare that caused all sorts of problems.
“Anyone else?” Jace asked. He knew no one else would, but it was courtesy to ask.
“It’s all yours,” Jace told the dwarf and assigned the axe to Krogan.
The dwarf bent down and lovingly picked up the axe. “Come to papa!”
“The ring next,” Lucy demanded.
Jace examined the ring the bandit leader was wearing. It was called the Ring of the Serpent’s Eye. Jace took the opportunity to examine and and whistled. The ring not only increased mana by 10%, it also acted as a mana battery, allowing a person to store up to 10% of their mana in it for later use. Effectively, it increased a person’s mana by 20%. Its secondary ability was to grant the wearer a rare ability called Tremor Vision. The person would be able to to “see” using vibrations in the air, negating a form of invisibility.
“Ring of the Serpent’s Eye?” he asked, looking at his party members. “Anyone other than Lucy.”
“It’s mine!” snapped the demoness. “That’s the whole reason I joined this doomed mission.”
Jace didn’t know anything about the ring or what it did, but he didn’t care. He was here for one thing - the sash. When no one else spoke up, he assigned it to Lucy, who quickly took it off the dead man’s finger.
She then stepped back, dropped from the group.
“You all are a bunch of newbie morons!” she spat as she began casting a spell. For a moment, Jace thought she might attack them. Normally, she couldn’t attack people in her own faction, like Jace, but since they were in the Outskirts, anyone could harm anyone they weren’t grouped with.
Fearing an attack, Jace was about to activate one of his stealth abilities when he recognized the spell as a teleport spell. Before any of them could say anything, she vanished.
Jace relaxed for a moment since there wasn’t going to be a fight, but then he remembered the demoness had been their “ride” home. She was supposed to teleport them all back to the city when they finished. Now it would take days to get back.
“That… that... hussy!” cried the normally timid Dharci. “She really just left us here?”
“Fraggin’ demoness,” cursed the dwarf. “I’m going to make sure my entire guild knows what she did.”
Jace laughed as he realized something and both Dharci and Korgan turned towards him with angry expressions.
Holding up his hands, Jace explained. “She was in such a hurry to abandon us that she didn’t get any of the money. And she didn’t think about the loot on the lesser bosses - including a caster.”
The dwarf and rabbit-kin’s heads snapped to where the two lesser bosses lay dead. Then they looked back and smiled. That meant more loot for each of them.
In the end, Jace got his Sash of the Kobadera, which is what he really wanted. Grinning, he examined it.
Sash of the Kobadera
Type: Belt (Leather)
Armor: 512 + Masterwork (100) + Sturdy (100)
Level: 95
Wt: .3 lb
Special: +10 Defense,
Set Bonus: Kobadera
3 Piece Bonus: +10% to Critical Strikes, +10% to duration of Stealth or Invisibility Effects
4 Piece Bonus: +10% to Backstabs, +10% to Stealth skill
5 Piece Bonus: +10% Health, +10% Mana
6 Piece Bonus: Cooldown of Assassin abilities reduced by 25%, +25% damage to all Assassin abilities
Description: Given to Knights of the Griffon who had distinguished themselves in a tournament, this amulet gives the wearer extra protection.
Restriction: This item is soul bound. When picked up, it binds itself to the person and cannot be traded, sold or looted by others. They remain with the person through resurrection.
He slipped off his old Belt of the Ninja and put on the Sash of Kobadera. Finally! He had it! And with the complete set, all of his Assassin abilities were increased by 25%! Finally, he would be considered raid ready!
Realizing the rest of the group was looking at him expectantly, Jace continued the looting. He distributed the gold and got his share of the money from the two lesser bosses. The combined money from the mini-bosses ended up being nearly as much as the money on the boss himself.
In addition, he picked up two magic items from the two lieutenants. The first was a pair of boots from the healer called Boots of Surefootedness. The other was an amulet from the mage called the Talisman of the Fire God. Neither were useful to him but might fetch a decent price on the marketplace. The rest of the items had gone to his companions, giving them a nice haul.
While they were looting, Krogan had Dharci cast a Divine Messenger spell to send a message to one of his guild wizards, a gnome named Krockety Ratchet who had teleported to them. Since Krogan was a guildmate and Dharci was his girlfriend, Krockety had offered to teleport them for free, but he charged Jace the going rate, which was 100 gold per level, plus tip. The total came to 10,000 gold but considering it saved Jace days of hiking alone through neutral territory, it was worth it.
Krockety teleported Jace to the neutral port of Burrafirth and then quickly teleported away. Jace had never been to Burrafirth before but knew it was a home to many of the various furry races. He’d have to explore it later. He was tired and it was time to log off.
Bringing up his HUD, Jace selected the logout option and the game world faced into blackness.
Chapter 4
Jace groaned as he opened his eyes to the inside of the virtual reality pod. Jace sat up and climbed out of the FEVRE pod. FEVRE stood for Full Environment Virtual Reality Emulator and was pronounced fever. Right now, his muscles ached, and he almost felt like he had a fever. But that was normal after being in the pod for so long. The pod did something to stimulate muscles while you were in VR to keep them from atrophying. He had read something about exactly how it was done, but he couldn’t recall. All he knew was that his muscles were sore. It didn’t matter though, he’d sleep it off and be fine tomorrow morning.
Stifling a yawn, he walked over to his refrigerator and grabbed a water. Twisting the cap off, he drank it all down. While the pods somehow stimulated his muscles while he was in VR, they couldn’t keep his hydration up. If he didn’t drink before and after, he could very quickly get dehydrated.
His next stop was the bathroom. That’s the other bodily function the pod couldn’t take care of, at least not his FEVRE pod. He had read about long term pods and even medical pods that kept people in VR for months, sometimes even years using IV drips and some sort of waste processing. But he didn’t have a million dollars to go out and buy one. For Jace, he still needed to come back to reality to eat, drink and use the bathroom.
He emerged from the bathroom and looked around his dimly lit apartment. It was a tiny studio apartment. To his right was his “bedroom” area, which consisted of a closet, a small end table and his bed, which was still messed up from the night before.
In front of him was his “living room,” which was completely taken up by the FEVRE pod. To his left was his tiny kitchen, as well as the door out to the hallway of his apartment building. There was a tiny table in the kitchen area that served as both his table and his desk.
Living the walls were posters of the last century’s vidstreams, what they used to call movies. He was fascinated by the older culture and had spent some of his extra money on reprints of the original movie posters. He also had some retro gear he’d managed to buy as well as a library of pirated vidstreams from the 1980s, ‘90s and even some from earlier this century. Other than VEIL, it was his only hobby. The place wasn’t much, and some people might call it claustrophobic, but it was all he coul
d afford at the moment on a junior programmer salary.
Thinking of his job, he glanced at the clock. It was 1 a.m. in the morning. He’d been in VEIL for seven hours. He should have been in bed two hours ago, but he just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get the Sash of Kobadera. Finally, he’d be able to go on raids and start making real money in the game. That was worth being tired at work tomorrow.
Stifling a yawn, he walked over to the bed and picked up his alarm clock. Setting his alarm back on the end table, he accidentally knocked over the only picture in his apartment. Swearing, he bent over and retrieved it.
Luckily, the frame hadn’t broken when it hit the floor and he took a moment to look at the picture. It was a picture of him on the day of his high school graduation. He was there in his graduation robes, along with his mother, his father and his sister. They were all smiling.
A pang of sadness hit him in the chest as he looked at the picture. It was the last time he’d seen them alive. They’d come to his graduation and were going to take him out to eat afterward to celebrate but he had begged to go with his friend, Michael. They’d relented and promised to take him out the next day but that had never happened. A truck in the opposite lane had blown a tire and swerved into their lane, hitting them head on. They were all killed instantly.
Jace hadn’t even known until Michael’s parents had dropped him off at his house to find the police waiting for him. They’d kept him to the station for hours until finally giving him to someone in child services. Since he had no living relatives, he’d been placed in foster care for four months until he turned eighteen. He’d never even been able to go to the funeral.
On his eighteenth birthday, he’d met with the lawyers who ran his parents’ estate, or rather, what was left of their estate. His parents had been relatively young and the only insurance policy they had was the one through his dad’s work. It had barely been enough to finish paying off the house and pay for funeral expenses. Then he found out that they also had no will, so the house was subject to some sort of inheritance tax and he’d have to pay 5% of the value of the house if he had wanted to keep it. Once you added lawyer’s fees, court fees and all sort of other fees that seemed to ooze out of the woodwork, he would have needed to pay $30,000 to keep the house.
As an 18-year-old orphan with no job, who had been in foster care for the last four months, he had no money to his name at all. He’d been forced to sell the house just to pay everything, leaving him with $170,000 dollars. He used the money to send himself to the college to study programming.
Even with money from the house, he still had been forced to work a part time job to make sure he’d had enough to graduate. Now, this picture was all he had left of his previous life. That and the FEVRE pod. Everything else was gone.
Jace felt his eyes getting watery and he placed the picture back in its place on the end table. He blinked the tears away and collapsed on his bed. His guilt was clawing its way back out from where he kept it buried. He, Jace, had killed his family. It was all his fault. If he had just gone out to eat with them, they’d still be alive. His dad, his mom and his little sister. They’d all be alive if it weren’t for him. And he wouldn’t be alone.
With dark thoughts swirling around his mind, Jace finally fell asleep.
Chapter 5
Jace stared at his computer screen, not really seeing what was there.
“Earth to Jace,” came a voice to his right, snapping out of his daze.
“What?” he stuttered and tried to look like he had been concentrating.
“Another late night?” asked Damian, a senior programmer on his team. He was a few years older than the rest of the team and loved to claim seniority to get his way. “I think I heard you snoring.”
Jace cringed. He hoped he hadn’t really fallen asleep at his keyboard. He started to reply and then yawned involuntarily.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” snickered Damian.
He took another sip of his energy drink before replying. “Yeah. I put together a pick-up group and raided Blackcoat Fortress. I finally got the Sash of Kobadera.”
“So, does that mean you’re going to try the raid scene?”
“Yeah,” Jace covered his mouth as he yawned again.
“You two and this game,” came a disapproving woman’s voice from the other side of the cube. “If you’re not careful, that game will become your life!”
The voice had a pronounced Indian accent, marking it as belonging to Minu. She was one of the other programmers on Jace’s team. Unlike he and Damian, she didn’t play VEIL, despite the fact that all three of them worked for WorldCog, the creator of the game.
“Playing the game makes us better able to troubleshoot it,” Damian countered.
“Hah,” she snorted. “A good programmer should be able to troubleshoot code regardless of whether or not they have used the application.”
“Yes mom,” Damian replied in a mocking voice.
Jace was too tired to join in their back and forth ribbing. Normally, he’d try to throw in his two cents, but today, it was taking all he had just to keep his eyes open. Forcing himself to focus on the code he was supposed to be troubleshooting, Jace once again read through it.
His team was one of many who worked on troubleshooting the millions and millions of lines of code that made up the most popular VR game in the world, VEIL Online. It was actually Jace’s dream job. Maybe being on the troubleshooting team wasn’t exactly his dream job but working for WorldCog had been his since he was sixteen years old and he had seen the previews for the game.
Jace smiled at memory of the first time he’d entered the game. His parents had gotten the family a FEVRE pod for Christmas and Jace had used what little allowance money he had to purchase his subscription to VEIL. It was the same FEVRE pod that now sat in his living room. A bittersweet reminder of better days and a different life.
He still remembered his first character, a Dwarven Paladin named Rodrick Hammerhand. He’d played the Rodrick character with his friends in high school, all the way up to graduation. It was those many gaming sessions that had inspired him to become a programmer. Jace had been so enamored with the game that he had wanted to do more than just play. He had wanted to create. He had wanted to build. That desire had caused him to take as many programming electives as he could his senior year.
But then the accident happened, his world was thrown upside down. Once he was in foster care, he’d lost contact with his friends. Once he got into college, he had thought about reaching out to them many times, but something always stopped him. He wasn’t sure what it was. Perhaps it was that they would bring back memories of the time before the accident. Memories of a family he had lost and could never have again.
Jace physically shook his head, as if doing so would shake out the dark thoughts that threatened to consume him. He pushed his attention back on the code. He scrolled through the code again, trying to force it to register in his tired brain. Then he saw it. Double checking, he verified that it was the issue. He made some corrections and put a comment in the code listing the change and the ticket number. Then he pushed the new code up into the repository and closed the ticket.
VEIL might be the most popular game in the world, but it was far from perfect. Yet, despite the small, and occasionally large, bugs, it earned more in a month than some small countries did in a year. All because it offered something that none of the other games on the market could. It could offer life after death. At least, a form of life after death. Jace still remembered when they had announced the technology that allowed specially designed machines to “backup” a person’s brain and insert their consciousness into the game. They had stopped all of his college classes that day as people everywhere were stunned at the announcement.
In essence, a person could live on after death by having their consciousness moved into the world of VEIL. And because of proprietary technologies WorldCog had patented, they were the only company able to offer it. They had basically patented i
mmortality. Jace smirked as he thought of their slogan “Play Forever”. Of course, as religious and spiritual leaders were quick to point out, it wasn’t really life after death. They claimed you became a soulless digital being, condemned to purgatory for all time.
Jace had attended a Christian church with his parents before they died. But since the accident, he hadn’t stepped foot in any church. He couldn’t. Not when their blood was on his hands. He could barely face himself. How could he face God?
His screen blinked, pulling him back to his job. The code was finished updating and the task was complete.
“Bug 734203!” he called out to his coworkers. It was a bit of a game that the members of his team played. Whenever one of them fixed some code, they yelled it out and the others would try to guess what had caused the issue.
“Logic error,” guessed Minu.
“Forgot to declare a variable,” Damion said from his cube.
Jace waited a moment for the other two members of his team to answer but remembered they worked from home on Fridays. They’d be online but obviously couldn’t take place in the office banter. Lucky them.
“Both wrong,” he told them tiredly. “They used the same variable name inside and outside their for… next loop. It was basically creating an infinite loop and caused the routine to return the wrong result.”
He heard snickers and chuckles from his two team members.
“Amateurs,” snickered Damion. The senior programmer had no tolerance for fools or bad coders. The guy was a great programmer and continually hinted that he had done some computer hacking back when he was younger. For all Jace knew, he still did hacking. Jace had often thought about trying his own hand at hacking. The idea was certainly thrilling but he just couldn’t risk the legal penalties if he were caught. He’d worked too hard to get where he was, and he wasn’t about to throw it away for a cheap thrill.
Veil Online - Book 1 (a LitRPG MMORPG Adventure Series) Page 3