“You fucking idiots!” I shouted, blocking the blows to my face with my arms. “We’re going to die if you kill her!”
But it was too late. The ship yawed as the rudders began to stroke the air unevenly, slowly building into an unstable pitching motion, back and forward and side to side. Half the mob was now trying to stop the other half, pulling the looters out of the bridge by their trousers and hair. I swayed up to my feet, bloodied and bruised, only to be thrown down by the motion of the ship. The sails snapped and loosened, wood moaning as the airship lurched and dropped. The powerful magical engines were surging, the regular thrumming sound becoming erratic as the deck angled up, sending everyone tumbling toward the back, then down, flinging the unlucky souls too close to the railings over the side.
I slid on my belly like a wet fish across the polished deck, flailing out desperately for something to grab. My native Tuun ability to withstand high altitudes and motion sickness was all that saved me from falling off the ship: I was able to stay orientated enough to catch the mast as I flew past it, hanging on as my HUD flashed in alarm.
Whatever had happened in the bridge, there was no recovering from it. I’d seen enough planes crash to know what a fatal angle of attack looked like, and now, I knew what it felt like, too. Surprisingly, not as terrifying as I’d expected. I’d thought I’d feel... something. Anything but cool self-control, a core of resignation that jelled as the ship groaned like a dying animal and rolled over. Whoever was at the controls was trying to save it by alternating thrust on either side, but it was too little, too late.
I hung onto the mast with all my strength, which became easier when the ship flipped and I could swing my legs up and wrap them around the mast, too. We tumbled toward the frozen ground below. If we landed on the hull, there was a chance I’d survive. If we landed on the deck...
Quest Update: Escape the Slave Ship... Or Die Trying
r̴̹̭̘̦̠̟̙̪̬̝̠͒͑͝ḛ̷̢̫͖̜̪͚̳͎̭̲̒͆͗̂̽̈́m̴̛͚̫̰̻̦͔̙̯̯̎͛̆ẽ̸̳͔̭͙͍̰͙͙̬̹ͅͅm̵̭̬̯̣̼͔̯̙͔̬̞̣̊̎̎̏̉͜͠͝b̸̧̛̻̟̟̳̠͕͇͊̓͗̆̿̌̐̀̓͗̏̌e̸̡͓̦̱̮̟̘͖̲̙͗͂̒̐͊͋̋͑͑͆͗̚ͅŗ̷̫͓̗͕̟͙̭͚̱̹͈͋̆̓̉̈́̋̀ ̴̨͚̥̦̯͚̼͍͂̔͊̀̃̓͊̎͋͐t̸͔͓̺̼͕͊͛̾͌̉̋̓̇͂̈́̆̆͗̚͠ȯ̸̦͕̘̳̬ ̸̢͍͕̓̔͊͑͋̿̈̉͘̕f̵̱̆̉͋͂͊͌̔̿̇͌̈́͗̃̚i̷̹̪̙͍̯̺͇̩̤͍͙̺͋̓̌̇͆̈́̅̋͘͠͝ͅņ̵̛͇̖̩̺̗͇̪̖̾͛͌͐̈͜͝ͅḑ̷̯̪̗̮̣͚̥͇̺͕̫͊́ͅ ̵̥͖̪̪͘͝m̶̧̛̼̹̺̭̺̩͈̣̹͍̪̳̩͐̈́̊͆̃̑͊̃͒͘̕͝͠ȅ̴̗͙͎͓ ̶̢̮͇̞͖̟̱̝̺̘́́̿͑̓͊̚̚͘͝i̶͉̫̐̓͗̒̈́̊͒ņ̵̵̢̧̠͍̱̱̝̫͍̹̗̦͔̘͔̘͙̖̹̫̯͑͋̂̈́͛͛͌̉͌̄̌́͘͜͜͝͝ͅM̷̡̢͚̫͙̲̆̆̈́̆̈́̊̿̈́̆͂ỵ̷̤̞̝̟̯̩͉͉̮̭͇̘̜̃͌̓͐̕͝s̷̨̡̘̦̮͖͙͆̑̾̈͗͑̓͘̚z̸̫̜͔͙͈̺̑̈́̏̏́ņ̷̛̤͚̹̣̥̘̲̪͇̖͒́͊͑̆̂̊͛̔̀ó̶̤̞͚͐̽͗́̾̀
Exp: 150 EXP
[Congratulations! You are Level 2!]
[You take 2500 points of impact damage!]
[You have died.]
Chapter 10
I respawned in the slave hold with my shoulder impaled by a shard of wood. It would have been less horrifying if it had hurt, or if it had been a visible injury of some sort, but there was no pain and no blood. My body had just formed around it like playdough, and I was stuck.
"Har har. Morning wood… I get it." Groaning, I looked around. The Arabella's hold was smashed, a landscape of wreckage jutting toward the sky, and I couldn't see much. My head was thick, my limbs tired and heavy. I tried to recall what had happened, and came up blank. There had been the sensation of falling, the rip and roar of the wind, and then a black rumbling through my bones before... nothing. Death had come so suddenly I hadn't even really had time to be afraid.
My HP was only a quarter full, the meter throbbing with a dull red pulse. A lot of small icons were flashing for attention in my HUD: messages, quest updates, status alerts.
[You are starving! -1 HP per 5 minutes, no HP regeneration.]
[You are parched! -1 HP per 5 minutes, no HP regeneration.]
[You have a message! Temperance writes: RE: Are you alright?!]
That wasn't good. I only had 45 HP left, which gave me just under an hour to find water and food, assuming I could extract the wood from my clipped arm without bleeding to death. Grimacing, I sat up, careful in case the shard was secretly attached to something. Then, I pulled up Temperance's message – it was short and to the point.
Hello, Hector: Please get in contact as soon as you’re able. We have news re: Steven Park. Temperance.
My head swooped. ‘News’. A tactful way of saying ‘he didn’t make it’.
I went back to the main menu and opened a private chat with Temperance. “I’m alive and checking in, ma’am. What can you tell me about Steve?”
After a couple of seconds, her window brightened, and a video feed opened. I saw her face neatly positioned within the frame, her expression carefully styled into a mask of concern. “Hector: thank you for getting back to us. We were beginning to worry again.”
“I’m still worried,” I replied. “What about my brother?”
“We would like to offer our condolences,” Temperance said. “He did not successfully transfer.”
I looked away, throat tightening.
In response to my silence, Temperance began to speak again. “You and your brother were both in the critical phase of HEX. Previously, we had only attempted uploads of people with Stage One and Two. He was our first Stage Four. It… decreased his odds substantially.”
“He might have made it. You didn’t know I was here.” My voice was still steady. “He could be alive, and we just don’t know it.”
“We knew you had reached the character creation and neural duplication stage. There is no record of him ever getting that far. No psychological or neural profile was created for him. We waited to see if the system would produce another anomaly, but there were no results. I’m sorry, Hector.”
I clenched my jaws, looking down at the tattoo branded into my flesh. I couldn’t even think about my big brother being dead - really dead - right now. He’d been my last family, my last link to the real world. It just... no. Not now, when I was stuck somewhere like this. I had to survive, push on. Then, I could think, digest the news... and mourn.
“Do you know what this symbol is about?” I lifted my arm to show Temperance the tattoo.
“It appears to be one of the elemental faction symbols. The Darkness faction,” she said. “Where did you get it?”
“Guy calling himself Matir. He helped me out of the bug.”
Temperance pressed her lips together in a thin line. She looked puzzled. “Matir is a feature in the game’s mythos and storyline, but not an active character. None of the draconic pantheon is. It was probably a contrivance of the AI. The game’s systems try to keep the world in-character at all times, so it made an auto-correction with something within the scope of the lore.”
Matir was a dragon god? Interesting. “What can you tell me about him? He gave me a quest.”
“Not very much. You would have to ask one of the developers,” Temperance replied. “But given that Matir is part of Archemi’s lore, they may be reluctant to tell you much.”
“Okay. One thing, though: is he a good or evil-aligned character?”
“The elements are fundamentally neutral,” Temperance replied. “But I am not connected to the game’s database. I have spent most of my time as the CEO’s personal assistant since I was deployed two years ago.”
Only two? I was about to say something sassy when something inside of the ship’s belly collapsed, and the smell of smoke drifted to my nose. “I’m stuck and about to burn to death. I’ll touch base again later.”
“Alright. We are very sorry to have to deliver-”
“I’m a soldier. I’ll cope.” I was an unwilling conscript, really, but I’d been through the dissociation training everyone else had. Before she could press me into the breakdown I was holding off, I cut the link and refocuse
d on my predicament.
"Okay, game." I reached up, seized the piece of wood, and let out a steadying breath. "Let's see if you autocorrect this shit."
I hauled on the shard for about a second, until pain blinded me and I let go with a yelp.
[You have taken 3 points of piercing damage!]
"Oh, fuck you." I picked myself up, and cautiously rolled my shoulder. As long as I didn't try to pull the wood out, it acted like it was part of my body. With a sigh, I called up an empty Dev Report, and dutifully filled it in. I mentioned that I'd spawned without any tools or inventory, but left out the part with Matir. I'd gotten a quest from him, so he was an NPC and part of the game. A creepy NPC with a creepy-ass quest, but a quest none the less.
Once the message was sent, I looked over my other alerts and my character sheets. As I was contemplating how my stats had gone up, I heard a sharp bang! and then the crumpling sound of collapsing wood overhead. The air was hazy, and it was getting harder to breathe.
Cursing, I looked around for my gear and weapon. It was at that moment that I realized I was stark naked, save for the addition of the wood. I picked my way over crumbling timbers, halting in disgust when I encountered the first crumpled body. It was a girl, and her bones had been smashed in so many places that her limbs were barely recognizable as arms and legs. The carnage only grew worse the farther I went, climbing naked down toward the deck through the gaps created from the crash.
I stumbled on the contorted corpse of the [Captain's Guard] we'd spared near the bridge, and stopped numbly, blinking as my brain tried to put the pieces of him back together. As I did, his loot list appeared, waiting patiently to my left while I struggled with shock. I looked past him, and realized that the deck had split from the sides of the ship and rammed up into its belly on an angle. Among the people tangled with the wreckage was Louis. Well... half of Louis. Sure enough, staring at him brought up the same menu. He was equipped with nothing except a [Torn Shirt].
Head ringing, I lurched to one side, fell to my knees, and threw up. With the Starving status in place, I didn’t produce anything except water, but it felt - and hurt - just like puking, only without the hydrochloric acid chaser. I could feel each one of these things piling up on me like weights. The ship crashing, Steven dead, the carnage around me… the death of hundreds, maybe because of my decisions.
“No!” I slammed a fist on the deck, struggling for breath. “No! Fuck this! I won’t let this fucking stop me!”
Anger replaced numbness as I pushed myself up, panting, and weaved my way to the wall of the ship. It arched over us like a giant fireplace full of tumbled kindling. I began to feel along it in the near-darkness, searching for a weak patch of wall until I found it.
The rumbling sound of the sea and a frosty ocean wind blasted my face as I kicked through a couple of shattered planks and squeezed through the hole. We had crash-landed on top of a cliff, sliding over the hard ground before coming to a stop against a snowbank. It wasn’t snowing right now, but the sky overhead was dark with swirling clouds. It was beautiful, in a stark, crystalline way.
[Warning: Temperature is dangerously low. Find clothing or armor for protection!]
“Alright! Jesus!” I wasn’t going back into the hold to pull clothes off the dead - no way. Instead, I pulled myself out, hung onto the edge of the hole, and dropped down to the ground. It wasn’t too far, only about twelve feet, but a long enough fall that I jarred my knees and feet when I landed. A pale blue ring joined my red HP corona: my hypothermia bar. Great.
I rubbed my arms briskly, looking around. There were dead people everywhere, some of them already attracting ravens. The birds were massive, larger than cats. Reluctantly, I found a corpse who was wearing heavier clothing - a jacket, shirt, pants and boots - and looted them bare. When I equipped the [Ill-Fitting Clothes], the pale blue bar disappeared. They weren’t the kind of clothes that could have protected someone in the real world, not unless they were a supernaturally tough Tibetan-Viking badass like me. I was feeling more nationalistic about Tungaant by the day.
As I turned back to the ship, I got a Quest prompt. Curious, I opened it up.
New Quest! (Optional): Find the Survivors
The slaver airship Arabella has crashed on the coast of the Northern Wastelands. You managed to survive - but what about the others? Pull people from the wreckage and prevent them from freezing.
Special: This quest is timed (120 min)
Rescued people: 0/???
Difficulty: Average
Reward: 20 EXP per rescued person and Renown.
I nodded and accepted, grimly surveying the destruction around me. For all I’d resented the draft, there was something to be said for military training. It gave you a different way of looking at the world, turning ‘hopeless disaster’ into objectives, situations and challenges.
My first challenges were to find something to eat and drink, then set up a place to take the wounded - there was no point in dragging them out of the wreckage only to have them freeze to death, and it was clear that this game was as much a survival game as it was an RPG. The key was the snow bank that had been created by the weight of the skidding skyship. The ship had split into three parts: the end of the ship was nothing but blasted debris that had exploded near the edge of the cliff. The burning, collapsed middle section and most of the deck was where I’d come from, while the remaining part of the deck, the bridge and prow had slid along the ground and driven snow up in an arched wall around it. That part of the ship wasn’t burning, and the snow formed a ready-made overhang that could be reinforced and used as a staging area for the injured.
Resolved, I stormed over and began to pick up useful-looking pieces of wood and tinder, belatedly realizing that the clipped piece stuck in my arm had finally vanished. The place where it had stuck still felt weird, so I turned away from the wind and opened my jacket to have a look at my shoulder. What I saw made me blanch. There was a black… scar? Wound? When I touched it, I felt nothing. The area was numb, and my fingers didn’t feel anything as I felt over it. I couldn’t push them through, but there was no sensation at all. The skin around it felt fine: It was just that jagged, triangular patch where the spike had jutted from my body.
Shivering, I closed my jacket up against the weather, and turned back to get to work. I stored firewood under the overhang, then began to pack down the walls, compressing the snow to make it firmer. Cold flakes rained around me as I worked, and the lip of it crumbled and showered me, but the majority of the impromptu cave was already solid from the impact. I used a timber to scrape away a hole at the back of the cave, and then built up a fire pit from packed snow, clearing it down until I reached the grass underneath. Snow was a surprisingly good insulator, when you were in a cold environment like this: if there was enough room between the fire and the side of the pit, it wouldn’t melt the snow and put itself out.
As I assembled the shelter, I got progressive alerts scrolling in the corner of my eye.
[Congratulations! You have learned Survival 1!]
[You have learned Survival 2!]
[Congratulations! You have learned your first Common Craft Skill: Improvise Shelter! Would you like to learn more about Crafting?]
“Sure. Why the hell not?” I was getting better at reading and-or absorbing knowledge from the prompts as I went about my business, so I set the message to read out as I angrily heaved firewood into the pit.
Crafting
Craft Skills in Archemi can be divided into two families: Common Crafts and Advanced Crafts. Common Crafts are craft skills which can be easily studied or discovered without the aid of special training or rare tools. They include Improvisional Crafting Skills (Shelters, Mending, Foraging), Gardening, Cooking, Prospecting, and Animal Husbandry. To learn Common Craft skills, you can talk to experts, experiment with the ingredients and tools you find, pull apart weapons and armor, read books or expose yourself to special Skill Runes.
Based on your unique cognitive profile, you may learn
any Common Craft to Journeyman level and fourteen common crafts to Master level.
Advanced Craft Skills, (Armoring, Alchemy, Gastronomy or Astrology, to name a few) require specialized tools and workspaces, as well as training. All Advanced Crafts require a working knowledge of synergized Common Craft skills to become available. For example, to gain access to Alchemy tuition or use Alchemy Skill Runes, you must have a basic working knowledge of collecting useful plants (Herbalism), and where to find them (Foraging). The higher your Common Craft skills, the faster you will advance in your chosen Advanced Crafts.
There are hundreds of Advanced Crafts to choose from, but you can only Master a maximum of fourteen, so choose wisely!
Crafting checks are based on your Intelligence + Perception + the most relevant physical stat to the craft. They also synergize with non-crafting skills, if those skills are available. For example, the general skill Survival synergizes with crafting Shelters, Foraging for food, and Mending your items. These General Skills give you bonuses to your Crafting attempts.
You will find it difficult to improve some Craft skills if you do not have supporting general knowledge - for example, Botany for Alchemy. In addition, some teachers may refuse to instruct you if you have not shown sufficient interest in your field by gaining knowledge or experience-based skills in their area of expertise.
I nodded along as I listened, dumping wood into the firepit and checking the time left on the countdown. I’d burned about 30 minutes setting up - not bad, given the circumstances. I decided to light the fire from some wood that was already burning instead of starting from scratch: there were plenty of embers to get a fire started, and drilling - rubbing a hard stick into a softer piece of firewood - took longer than it would for me to jog down and get wood that was already burning. I was shaky, still losing HP, but my Tuun toughness was standing me in good stead.
Dragon Seed: A LitRPG Dragonrider Adventure (The Archemi Online Chronicles Book 1) Page 9