I shook my head as I stumbled away, teeth ringing. The magic pumped information into my brain, so much of it so fast that I clawed at my scalp in an effort to contain it.
…A thunderous veil of light pours from the spear, over the gate, swallowing the magi who have been holding the power of the Goddess contained. The pearl falls from its setting, its power spent…
The vision faded as quickly as it had come, leaving me alone in the cold. I turned to look back at the frozen Aesari. She was glowing softly in the gloom.
Quest Updated: Restore the Spear of Nine Spheres
You have learned that the Pearl of Glorious Dawn is the key to the Dragon Gate of Light in Ilia. It is imbedded in the crystal with the fossilized Aesari priestess. Smash the fossil, retrieve the Pearl and return it to the Spear (Part 2 of 3).
Reward: EXP, Mental Skill EXP, Ancient Treasure
“It’s a trap.” I meandered back over to the giant crystal, keeping a safe distance from it. “It has to be. But… is the Gate in Cham Garai? The Eyrie, maybe?”
I didn’t get to finish my thought, because suddenly, my mouth was full of blood.
The stab impact felt like a punch to my back. There was hardly any pain, just the obscene sight of a sword blade sticking out of the front of my chest, through one of the tiny gaps in my armor.
[You have taken 150 points of Precise Backstab damage! HP 18/320.]
[Critical Hit!]
[Surprise hit!]
[You are bleeding! 1 HP per second damage for 20 seconds!]
[You are incapacitated!]
[Warning! You are at 17 HP!]
I was dragged back, flailing and spinning around as someone put their boot against my back and kicked me off the blade. I staggered to the side and toppled over, pawing at the bloodstain blooming on my chest, and watched in paralyzed shock as Baldr Hyland bent down to pick up the Spear of Nine Spheres.
Chapter 37
“Oh god.” Lucien said from somewhere further back in the room. “I can smell it. Oh Jesus.”
“Shut up and quit your whining.” There was no friendly warmth in Baldr’s voice now, just cold, hard focus. “Let’s see here…”
I foamed blood from my mouth, coughing it onto the floor in my efforts to tell him that he was a traitorous, griefing piece of shit. There was no way he could use the Spear, though – it was a soulbound weapon.
Assuming it wasn’t, in fact, some kind of player trap.
Baldr picked it up, and swished it down a couple times, like how I’d done when Rutha had first told me to hold it in my hand. “Hey, this is light. And what have we here…? Restore the Spear of Nine Spheres? Damn, I knew you were holding out on us, but this is an S-tier quest.” Baldr planted the butt of the Spear on the floor, scanning the HUD display I couldn’t see.
A nervous thrill passed through my chest. Holy shit. Matir was right. The Spear and the quest were loaded. They were either a bug… or that crazy Dev, Ororgael, had set this whole thing up. And Baldr didn't know. “How… how the fuck did you find me?”
“You’re on my party history list,” Baldr replied, arching one ghostly eyebrow. “I can see you on the map.”
I stared at the big man in disbelief. Lucien was wearing rogue gear, not knight equipment, but Baldr was in full plate and a ripped half-cloak. He’d stuffed torn strips of fabric between the plates. I spat blood onto the floor to clear my mouth. “So the whole thing was bullshit. That entire lecture was bullshit. What the fuck class are you? Spirit Knight? Is that even a ‘real’ Knight?”
“I don’t think that’s any of your business,” he said.
I decided to stall for time. “Knights don’t sneak.”
“I spent six years sneaking around the jungle in a USMC Templar warfighter, squish,” he drawled. He didn’t turn to look back. “You think old Baldr didn’t learn a thing or two about moving quiet while heavy?”
I cleared my throat enough to croak out a suitable one-word reply. “Mother-f-fucker.”
He shook his head. “I told you once, and I’ll tell you again. Great men take what they want. It’s been that way for all of history. Now, an Artifact like this is worth at least a million. I’d have done it before now, but we were being watched.”
“Baldr, can we just get this over with?” Lucien whined.
“Sure we can. Step up and kill him, Mr. PK-everyday. Now’s your chance to show me what you got.” Baldr headed past me to the imprisoned Aesari. “This thing comes with a quest. By the look of things, I’m supposed to free this lil’ gal over here.”
I almost felt like laughing, though that would have hurt too much. “You don’t want to do that. Seriously, this whole thing is s-some kind of player t-trap.”
“Uh-huh. Don't think you can Brer Rabbit your way out of this one, Dragozin.” I couldn’t see his face, but I heard the sneer in his voice.
“Suit yourself. But you tell me how you can just pick up my soul-bound weapon like this.” I had one quick-heal item left.
“Game’s buggy as hell is why. Damn near lost my leg when I fell through a bridge one time.” Baldr glanced back, then advanced to the golden plaque where I’d gotten the first round of information about the Pearl. "Kill him, Luci."
While Baldr was absorbed and Lucien hesitantly moved toward me, I pulled the final poultice from my Inventory and slapped it on. Lucien made a strangled sound and sprinted forward. My health jumped from 6 to 56, but he was on top of me before I could properly react.
He raised a short Japanese-style sword overhead, but I could see the fear in his eyes, the weak grip, the hesitation. He might have been a keyboard warrior, but this was beyond VR. For all intents and purposes, he was about to murder - really murder - for the first time. With the smell of blood in his nostrils, he was terrified... and all I needed was a moment of distraction. Something that scared him even more than killing me.
It came to me in a flash of dark inspiration.
"Hey, Luci – you were right. The Alliance nuked your Shard," I rasped.
"What?" He froze, hand shaking. "What did you say?"
"Don't talk to him, kill him! You’re not on a damn date!" Baldr yelled from across the room. “He’s already said too much.”
"That blackout before. Remember that?" I lay back, trying not to struggle. The poultice had stopped the bleeding, but I was only regenerating one hit point per second. “The game reset. Can you log out?”
"You're so full of shit." He tensed up, jaws snapping shut, eyes narrowing as he built up to the strike.
"Go ahead and stab me. I’ll respawn. I don't give a fuck anymore." I forced myself to keep my eyes locked with his, instead of drifting to the blade. "But you were fucking right. The Pacific nuked us."
"That's... that's ridiculous! I’m still here. I’d have f-felt something." Lucien dropped his voice so that Baldr couldn't hear him. The big knight was lost in a trance some fifteen feet away.
“Look, this is bigger than this game.” Some dark part of me was grinning inside. "See if you can log out. And if you can, then you know I'm a liar. Then kill me."
"One move. One move, and I'll do it." Lucien's nostrils quivered as he put his knife to my throat and pushed it up under my jaw. He held it there as his eyes became distant and began to scan something I couldn't see. My pulse beat against the edge of the blade, ten beats... and then the thin man's pale face turned the color of milk. "It's gone. It's gone!"
"About fucking time," Baldr called back. "Man, that was a trip. Now hang onto your panties, I'm about to crack this thing."
"It's gone. The logout option is gone. There's no one... Temperance is offline. Everyone's offline!" Lucien recoiled in panic. He wasn't a soldier. He was a poor little rich boy who couldn't handle his adrenaline. "Where is it? Why can't I find it. Fuck! FUCK!"
Almost of its own accord, my branded hand shot out like a snake. I grabbed him by the throat and activated Life for Life.
Lucien's eyes bugged as the dark energy surged through my body and into his. My Adrenaline
Points were full from the damage I’d taken. I burned them like a fuse and sucked the life out of him. It was like a hit of smack straight to the brainstem, and it was FAST - there was no fancy mystical woo-woo, no buildup. Just a burst of dark power, Lucien's short bleating scream, and the surge of renewed energy and power. I was back to 105 HP.
With a snarl, I pushed him off, pulled the sword out of my back and threw it at him, just as Baldr shattered the Aesari's crystal prison with the Spear.
Lucien dodged the spinning blade, but whatever counter he'd been about to do was cut short when slivers of crystal exploded outward from the entrapped Aesari. There was a split second where we saw her come to life - floating, radiant, like the core of a star. And with it came a one-line system message.
[Wakey wakey, rise and shine!]
I didn’t even have time to note how weird that was before the explosion threw me, but it threw Baldr further. I spammed Shadow Dance, dissolving and reappearing ahead of the shockwave. Lucien screamed, and Baldr's deeper bellow suddenly stopped as he skidded into a wall, headfirst, and hit it with a dull crunch. We were still partied up, and I could see his HP ring. Empty. As the light shrunk back into the center of the room, I ran over to his corpse, pulled the Spear out of his smoldering hand, and hesitated for a moment before looting him of everything he carried. Gear, clothes, items, weapons: the lot.
The core of light was building up to a second explosion, sucking the dust of the room back into itself.
"Asshole!" I spat on him, uploading his gear to my Inventory, and ran for my life.
My HUD was pinging me as I sprinted out around the bloated body of the dead frog and ran for the exit. There was an exit illuminated by the piercing ray of light flaring out of the crystal room. The great bronze door was still ajar from where Baldr and Lucien had entered, the passage beyond littered with unclaimed junk loot from the frogs they'd killed on the way in. A few of them had respawned, but I didn't stop to whack them. I kept running until my stamina was maxed out and I was out of breath, waited, then kept going. On the way, I pitched the useless junk I'd looted from Baldr on my way through the ruins. He had a lantern, which I equipped to my belt so that I could see, and as I jogged through the ancient flooded buildings, I threw his heavy gear and bloodied clothing down holes and into streams, freeing myself of the dead weight. Only once I was near the base of the Eyrie did I stop running and had a look at my menus and messages.
The 'Restore the Spear of Nine Spheres' quest was still live. No reward had been delivered to my Inventory or Baldr's. No shiny treasure chest, not even EXP. I checked the weapon, and its stats were the same, except that now it was at 30% durability instead of 36%. There was no explanation, no update, nothing except a horrible sinking feeling I felt in the pit of my belly. The Spear of Nine Spheres was still broken, and the Gates were still unstable. Or were they? Was this thing cursed? Because it definitely wasn’t soul-bound.
Hurriedly, I checked everything. Character stats, level, EXP... I didn't have a PK tag, thank goodness. Marching into the Eyrie with the Mark of Matir was bad enough without also being branded as a player killer. I checked my message center, desperately searching the ranks of Devs and checking to see if Temperance was on. They were still all offline. All I had to go off was what Matir had told me.
"...Once, an Architect fell to Earth. His name was Ororgael. Like you, his spirit did not incarnate correctly. Unlike you, he was not rescued from purgatory by one of the Nine, nor by any of the Young Gods of humankind... he was rescued by the Drachan. The other Architects pulled him out of Archemi like a tumor, but cancer has a way of hanging on to the body, doesn’t it?"
"Fuck this shit. I just want a goddamn dragon. Is that too much to ask?” I grumbled, hiking off into the darkness.
It was night outside, but the ruins were warm. That meant I was quite deep underground, so I decided on trying to find a way up and out. The cave I’d originally come in from wasn’t a good candidate for that, so after making some torches with wood and frog fat, I searched the giant hall. My good mood returned when I discovered one wall that was covered in what looked like a sheet of gray lung tissue. The nodules on it opened and closed like blinking eyes, and at the center of each one was a crescent-shaped spore capsule. These were the Cat’s Eye Mushrooms I needed for the Trial, and there were lots of them. I gathered as many mushrooms as I could, holding my breath against the poisonous spores. They’d come in useful for Alchemy later on. I figured I was going to get in trouble for choosing Dark Lancer, so I might as well go the whole way and experiment with poisons. What the commander didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him, unless he somehow got into my backpack and started drinking random potions.
Even a shallow breath of the gas around the mushrooms left me wheezing, a mild debuff that slowly ticked down as I made my way through the dungeon. Everywhere I turned, there were monsters. Mutated bats, slimes, things with too many mouths… but I didn’t fight many of them, because they ranged from Level 6 through to Level 15. Level 15 creatures weren’t supposed to exist, no more than the Behemoth Aberration had… the Devs had put a level cap on monsters and players. Something was really screwy. My only guess was that the restrictions had not been installed on whatever the game had booted off during the reset.
***
After a couple hours of walking and climbing, I was within sight of the outside world. The smell of fresh air gusted through the dungeon and cooled the nervous sweat running down my face as I crouched behind a tumbled block of masonry. Some eight feet away, a Level 15 [Assassin Bug Drone] was slowly flying by. Inside the confines of the cave, the wolfhound-sized bug sounded like a helicopter lifting off, wings humming with a deep bass buzz. As it got closer, I held my breath, squeezing the haft of my Spear to otherwise remain still.
The assassin bug drifted up to my right, its carapace gleaming black in the bluish light cast by the luminescent fungi on the walls, and hovered thoughtfully. Then, without any warning, it stabbed down with its stinger barely three feet from where I hid. I heard a squeal, and the monster rose back up with a rabbit-sized rat impaled on the barbed length. It writhed and screamed in its death throes as the bug wheeled around and thrummed off somewhere to enjoy its meal undisturbed.
Mouth dry, I cautiously scrambled out, moving on my hands and the balls of my feet, and kept heading in the direction of the wind.
[Your Stealth skill has increased!]
Damn-fucking-right my Stealth skill had increased. In a very un-knightly fashion, I’d been relying heavily on stealth to get through the ruins. With the Spear, I could take enemies two or even three levels above me, and I’d been killing them when it was safe… but there were monsters here even more powerful than Frogger. Along the way, I looked inside of pots and tumbled stone furniture, looting whatever common items I could find. Archemi wasn’t so realistic as to deprive the intrepid explorer of loot, and I was able to score torches, linen, interesting molds and fungi, and even a couple of strange-looking silver pieces, which automatically converted to Ilian currency in my Inventory.
It took another forty-five minutes to reach the outside world through a sunken stone archway. Grateful to be alive and outdoors, I scrambled up the broken stairs and vaulted out onto soggy ground, looking around to orientate. I was back in a swampy marshland, much shallower and far more lifeless than the one I’d first entered on the other side of the ruined city. Small hills and shallow gullies rolled on for what seemed like miles into the mist that surrounded me. Looking up, I could see the distant fire burning at the top of Eyrie a mile or two away, and could hear the distinct, far-off cries of Crowned Eagles, the roar of dragons, and the gurgle of stagnant water. Checking my map, I felt my spirits lift. This was the Old Battlefield. I’d made it, with close to twenty-three hours left on the clock.
I found a place to make a concealed camp, but before I settled down, I made sure that Baldr was not somehow in my party. He wasn’t - but I hesitated before blocking him. If he was blocked, he wouldn’t show up on my radar, an
d I didn’t trust Archemi’s systems enough to risk him being completely invisible. It was a good idea to be able to keep track of enemy players.
The situation numbed and exhausted me. I enjoyed PvP in other games I’d played, but I was cooperative by nature. I was always there for my guild before the war, and my platoon during it. When I played old JRPGs or other solo games, I always got attached to the NPCs who were there to support me. They were often more colorful than the main character.
I’d convinced myself that all the HEX-refugees would have every reason to work together. We had common ground. We had everything to gain, because if we passed the Trial, we would all be dragon riders. It didn’t matter that there were only three eggs. If all six of us made it, three of us would get a dragon now, and the other three would be able to grind until the next clutch. The only difference was that they’d be a higher level when they got their wings.
Baldr and Lucien’s actions bewildered me as much as they pissed me off. Because not only was it pointless, but PKing in Archemi meant you had to be really willing to murder someone. Blood, guts, the smell… it was about as realistic as it got. Lucien apparently hadn’t gotten it until he’d seen me go down, but Baldr knew. And he was willing to do it anyway.
I really needed some answers, and I needed to find friends. And as I looked up at the Eyrie, a small dark voice whispered in my ear. You’re not going to find friends in this place. But you will find something.
With a sigh, I rubbed my face, then started searching for a way to bring Cutthroat to my position. Most games had some form of a mount summoning option. I queried my HUD, and sure enough, a glowing hookwing-shaped icon appeared. When I pressed it, Cutthroat appeared in front of me in the shadowy gloom with a squawk, whipping her head from side-to-side as she struggled to get her bearings.
Dragon Seed: A LitRPG Dragonrider Adventure (The Archemi Online Chronicles Book 1) Page 31