“Sure thing,” George said as Sabre pulled me in the direction of the priests, and as sad as it was, the only thing I could think about was how good her hand felt in mine.
27
“So, I’ve got a question,” I asked as we made our way through town. Sabre was still holding my hand, which was a touch weird, but I’d been pretty good about ignoring it. I wasn’t sure why, I mean, I guess I could have said something, but if I did, I was fairly certain she’d pull her hand away, and I really didn’t want her to do that.
“What is it?” she asked, raising an eyebrow at me. “If it’s about the Challenger mission, I really don’t know much about it.” She socked me on the shoulder. “Not my department.”
“Um… are you talking about the Challenger space shuttle?” I took a deep breath as I spoke, realizing she’d been frozen in 1982 and had missed the Challenger explosion that had killed the seven crew members when the spacecraft disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean. “Because, I dunno how to tell you this, but it exploded on January 28, 1986.”
“Wait, what?” she asked, releasing my hand as she flailed. “Seriously?”
“Yeah, um… the Challenger exploded due to a structural failure that killed the entire crew.” I tried to smile as her face fell, and I realized she was quite literally old enough to be my mother. Only she didn’t look that old. I wasn’t sure how similar her avatar was to her real body because of the way Two’ Manchu appeared in and out of game, but either way, I’d have had to pay good money to a lot of deities for a girl as pretty as this woman to so much as talk to me.
“I can’t believe Francis is dead. Son of a bitch,” she said smacking her hip with one hand. “Goddammit!” As she muttered and wiped her eyes on one hand. “I’m guessing that means we never made a lunar base then, eh?”
“I like how we’re actually trapped in virtual reality, and you’re asking about a lunar base.” I said, trying to figure out how best to comfort her when she seemed determined to bury whatever emotion she felt.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “All things are amazing until you know about them. Then it’s much less amazing.” A sad smile flitted across her lips as she looked me over. “You never did ask me your question.”
“Oh!” I said, remembering what I’d been about to say before the whole Challenger disruption. “I was gonna ask you about the encounter with the lich. He seemed to know I was a necromancer, but there aren’t classes here. At least not in the World of Warcraft way.”
“I’m not sure what you mean by World of Warcraft.” She smiled sadly. “Must be after my time, but that’s because of the way the game works.” She gestured at the surroundings. “The game makes an assumption based off the skills you have equipped and assigns a class to it. The classes are somewhat fluid and change depending on what skills you have active.” She shrugged. “It may not matter now, but at some point, we’ll find items with class bonuses and such. Trust me when I say this. There’s absolutely nothing worse than having an awesome skill and not being able to use it because you lose half your item bonuses.”
I mulled that over. It seemed sort of reasonable. I mean if each skill had a class designation associated with it, then it’d be simple enough to have your class be based on the way your active skills meshed. I’d known a couple games that were that way. Borderlands, for example, changed the modifier of your class depending on what skills in which trees you had at the time…
That was when a lightbulb went off in my brain. Was that why TG had been so focused on classes? To make the most of those modifiers here? Crash had said they’d spent a lot of time developing the perfect builds, but at the same time, they’d missed skills like Chaotic River and Stun Shock. That didn’t seem possible unless they’d purposely dropped those skills to maintain the class balances…
I opened my skill window and looked at the skills I had. None of them said which class they were, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t more data not being shown to the user…
“You seem to know a lot about this game for someone stuck in the newbie area,” I said, glancing at Sabre as we made our way past the fountain in the center of town. Cain stood beside it, already hard at work lecturing a group of bored children, and as he waved to me, I couldn’t help but think that in about a day, the Skeleton King was going to kill the fuck out of everything here.
Sabre had said no one had ever beaten him, and while she’d been a statue for a while now, I was wondering if that was still the case. From the sounds of things, her team had certainly tried a bunch, but at the same time it was a low level quest…
“I know a lot because I was in charge of knowing a lot.” She waved at Cain. “I was the build girl.”
“The build girl?” I asked raising an eyebrow at her. “I have no idea what that means.”
“Lies.” She huffed at me. “You know that person who is in every guild, and they’re not the leader, but they know everything? Like, they’re not a bad player per se, but they’re not top DPS, or most heals, or whatever? But if you want to know what four skills to chain together to do maximum damage or what affinity a monster is weak against or how to cheese a boss’s special attacks, you know, that guy?”
“Yeah, I know the type. Back in my guild in TG it was a dude named Armando. The guy would always run right into traps during the Ant Queen fight, but damn if he didn’t know exactly what set of skills to use for anything.” I smirked, remembering the time our Ventrilo channel had went ape shit telling him to avoid the mines the boss had strewn across the floor as he ran straight into them, and as I did, I realized Crash had been fulfilling that role, only, not very well because he didn’t know this game that well. It was too different from TG.
“That’s the build guy, or in my case, the build girl. I only went in because we lost a few players during a castle siege to the Russians. We needed someone in game who knew stuff because the lag over communications was too high with the outside world, so I came in with my friend, Dick.” She swallowed and looked at her feet. “I just wound up getting frozen during a quest. I’m not the world’s best player or anything.”
“You seem pretty damned powerful to me,” I said, gesturing at her. “All your armor is shiny, and you had all those nutso skills.”
“We data mined a lot of skills out of the game, but the problem is, unless you know what they’re supposed to do, you can’t really get them to work.” She looked at her feet sheepishly. “It was sort of my job to try to make those skills work. Not many did though. I’d say for every skill like Chaotic River, I found twenty or thirty useless skills. It was a lot harder than you’d think because sometimes you’d find a really buggy skill and using buggy skills can get you killed so…”
“Wait, all those skills you showed us are buggy?” I asked, raising an eyebrow at her.
“No.” She shook her head. “The ones you learned from me were legit. Here’s the thing with them though, those stun skills aren’t good solo. They just seemed good because we were in a group. Take the combo I did on the boss. I could have kept him stunned all damned day, assuming my mana was up to the task, but I wouldn’t be able to do that and DPS him down. No, you’d need someone else to deal all the damage. That’s where you guys came in.” She smiled at me. “Remember, I said we could only come in two at a time, and we only had four skill slots. Because of that, we focused on stuns because it kept us from taking damage, which meant we didn’t have to heal.” She shook her head. “We ran away, a lot.”
“That doesn’t explain the armor,” I said as we arrived in front of a massive church. Statues depicting males and females in various fighting poses lined a courtyard made of black stone. Most of them were locked in battle, reminding me of the sculptures I’d seen in the ruins when I’d visited Greece that one time. There’d been this museum with all these murals they’d dug out of some burial ground showing Zeus and the like battling various Titans. This was like that, only rendered in full 3D and not broken.
“Wow,” I said, swallowing hard, and as I stood there gawking
with my mouth opened, Sabre started to laugh.
“It’s pretty amazing the first time you see it, that’s for damned sure,” she said, looking around with jaded eyes. “Old hat for me, I guess. I’ve seen a few dozen adventurers come through here besides myself.” She rubbed her eyes before taking another look around. “Granted, it wasn’t this pretty…”
“It’s kind of spectacular,” I said, swallowing hard. “I can’t imagine what it’d be like to go to school in virtual reality. When you talked about history or whatever, you could literally be there and experience it…”
“Or, you know, train people to be awesome soldiers.” She took a deep breath as a darkness passed through her eyes. “But different strokes.” As I opened my mouth to ask her about that particular question, she cut me off with a wave of her hand. “And to answer your question. I have gear from a few towns up. We transferred it here for me to use, well, for everyone to use. Can’t do much better than that because the level restrictions on the items start hitting you too hard. I mean, you can equip stuff that’s too high level, but the penalties are so bad, you might as well not wear it.” She leaned into me then. “I’m surprised you didn’t know that. Your friend, the pally, has gear from the same town as me. At least her armor and stuff, so why don’t you guys.”
“That’s a great question,” I asked as a surge of anger flared through me. If what she was saying was true, then Dark Heart’s gear was so much nicer looking because it really was better. It had always seemed nice, but I hadn’t known why. If it was really from a few towns up, why hadn’t she gotten some for all of us?
“I can see lots of thoughts running through your brain.” She pinched her nose. “And smell something burning in there.” She waved her hand at me like she was fanning away the toxic fumes of my thought process. “Come on, let’s get your medallion purified. I’m dying to see what it does.”
“Okay,” I said as we headed into the church, only I was suddenly a lot less interested in my medallion and way more interested in wringing Dark Heart’s neck like she was a duck in a Chinese butcher’s shop.
28
My mind was still reeling from what Sabre had told me about Dark Heart’s gear being from a few towns away because it threw into question everything I’d thought I’d known. I mean, okay, I’d known Dark Heart was responsible for recruiting us to play this game. Hell, she’d quite literally drugged me and taken me somewhere so my brain could be put in a jar and hooked up to this VR MMO, but at the same time, I’d thought we were on the same goddamned page.
I mean, okay, Ivan, our handler had been one hundred percent absent since he’d sent me here, and while that was really fucking annoying, I was pissed about this whole gear thing.
If we were supposed to win this game, and I had to presume she did actually want us to win, why hadn’t there been gear waiting for us? Jesus tap-dancing Christ, I’d started with my fists, and the only reason I’d even managed to get a weapon was by a fluke encounter with a mini boss. It was insane when she could have just given us stuff that was clearly better than pretty much everything we’d found given how she never really wanted anything besides swords and shields.
“So why doesn’t Dark Heart have a better weapon and shield?” I asked through clenched teeth while trying to keep my tone level and failing utterly.
As Sabre pushed open the massive doors to the cathedral in front of us, causing the sound of soft music to hit my ears, the look on her face made me think she thought she’d upset me, and something about that bugged me. A lot. I didn’t want her upset at me. No. This wasn’t her fault at all.
I started to shake my head as I opened my mouth to tell her I wasn’t mad at her when she reached out and touched my wrist with one hand.
“Sorry, if I upset you,” she murmured, leaning toward me as she spoke. “I wouldn’t have said anything, if I’d known it would make you so…”
“It’s not that,” I mumbled, swallowing down the urge to defend myself. Instead, I decided to attempt to be mature and put my big boy pants on. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have snapped at you. I’m just angry at Dark Heart, at this whole situation, really.”
“I can see how you would be.” She nodded as she took a step closer to me. “You don’t seem like the type of guy we normally send here. You don’t have that whole military thing going on.” The corners of her mouth quirked into a smile as she moistened her lips. “You’d be more of a trainer…”
“Yeah, I guess policy changed,” I replied as I turned over her words in my mind. Maybe they were still sending soldiers into the game when she’d come through. Maybe they hadn’t gotten around to gamers yet, which I guess made sense because there would have been what? Nintendo and Atari when she first came here? “I think a lot of things have changed in the last half century.”
“People don’t change, at least not in the government. That’s like the iron rule of bureaucracy,” she said, looking at me in a way that was sort of shocking because for that moment, I felt like I had the whole of her attention, like she was actually seeing me.
It was weird because I couldn’t remember someone had actually cared enough to really look at me, and something about it made me feel incredibly special. I wasn’t even sure why she was paying such close attention to me, but in that moment, I realized I didn’t care. I just wanted her to keep looking at me like that and never stop.
“That doesn’t really answer my question,” I said, fidgeting slightly because I didn’t quite know how to look back at her in the same way, and I didn’t want her to see that in me and decide to ignore me like Dark Heart mostly did.
“To answer your question from earlier, weapons, and certain items like jewelry and shields have to be crafted, and you can’t equip any crafted item until level twenty.” She rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “It’s why some people don’t bother with upgrades and instead try to save for a crafted gear set to use when they hit twenty so that when they do level up that high, they become immensely stronger.” She turned toward me slightly and reached out to touch my hand, only she must have thought better of it because she stopped at the last second and squinted her eyes at me. “I wouldn’t be mad at her for having that gear. I know it seems unfair, but I doubt it came cheaply, if you know what I mean.”
“I do not know what you mean,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest as we moved out into the main corridor of the church. It was bright, and as light filtered through the stained glass windows all around us, I found myself shielding my eyes from the glare. Crazier still was the smell, like fresh baked chocolate cookies, that filled the air.
“It’s better if you don’t then.” She made a noncommittal gesture. “Only people high up had access to a perk like that because it takes kind of a lot of effort to get someone to transfer it into the newbie area. Assuming you’re low enough of a level to actually come back here, the scroll to return to the Town of Silver Gables costs something like a hundred thousand Rhuvians, which is hardly worth it to transfer less than fifty thousand Rhuvians worth of gear. Especially considering that most of the gear will be replaced by level twenty and most people leave here by level fifteen.”
“Fair enough,” I growled even though it seemed like a stupid answer because I had been under the impression this was some kind of government related endeavor, and I’d never been under the impression black budget projects were particularly thrifty. Then again, what I knew about the way this world worked could fit in a goddamned shoebox.
“You don’t seem like you believe me. Ah, well.” She shrugged and turned away from me like she was looking for someone or something. After a moment, her eyes settled on a man standing in the far corner.
He had long flowing blond hair and wore white robes that made him seem waifish, and as we approached him, I realized he was lighting candles every color of the rainbow while standing beneath a mural depicting several bare chested gods fighting a massive snake while lightning flashed in the background.
“Hello, father,” Sabre called, and the m
an turned to regard us quizzically. As he did, I realized he was really young seeming, maybe only fifteen, which struck me as weird. I mean, calling priests father had always been weird, but this guy couldn’t even be old enough to be my brother unless my parents had decided they desperately wanted to go through the whole teenager thing once they were done with it.
“Hello, adventurers. How may I be of service?” the priest replied in a soothing voice while looking us up and down before settling his eyes on my boots.
“We have a cursed item we were wondering if you could take a look at,” Sabre said, elbowing me in the side even though it was totally unnecessary.
I huffed and pulled out the medallion, and even though it hadn’t done it before, the medallion now glowed with faint red light. As I produced it, the priest exhaled loudly and shut his eyes before casting his head heavenward and muttering something under his breath.
“I am not sure I can help you with that,” he said, opening his eyes and reaching out a hand for the item, which I gave him. “Is this the fabled Medallion of Courage?”
“It is,” I said, smiling at him because the way he’d said it made me think he was impressed. I wasn’t sure why that made me feel pretty good because he was an NPC, but it did. “Do you think you can help?”
“No.” His shoulders slumped as he shook his head. “The problem is that the person who wears this must show courage. The only way to do that is to use it despite the curse. It’s why you’re the first player I’ve ever seen take it up.” He gave me a polite nod and offered me the medallion. “If I remove the curse, the medallion will disintegrate.”
“Wait, you mean to tell me, not only am I the only person who has ever picked this thing up, I’m stuck with this stat reducing monstrosity until we complete the quest?” I snapped, snatching the medallion back and glaring at it like it’d kicked my dog. “That’s bullshit.”
Soulstone: The Skeleton King: A LitRPG Novel (World of Ruul Book 2) Page 19