Perks
Dark Vision: As part of your Half-Elf heritage, you can see in total darkness, although only in a monochrome blue.
True Sight: A gift shared by Adventurers and Eternals. You can see the Class, Level and Characteristics of any being or item up to fifteen levels above your own. The range of his perk is determined by your Perception Attribute.
Undying: Unlike mere mortals, Eternals can return to life after being killed, although the process is traumatic and multiple deaths will carry a heavy price, reflected by your Identity Characteristic. When killed, your body and any carried or Soul-Bound items will disappear, only to return three to six hours later at your selected Reincarnation point.
Each time you die, you will lose 1-3 Identity Points, as well as all your accumulated Experience. You may also start to forget things about your past. If your Identity is reduced to zero, you will cease of exist as an Eternal, and experience what all living things do when they die. Your Identity will be reinforced by one point for every level you gain. To advance in power is the key to immortality.
Unlimited Potential: As an Eternal, you can learn any skill through practice and training, ignoring class or racial requirements. Additionally, you can choose to advance in multiple Classes. You chose your first class at Level One, and will be able to select an additional class at level ten, twenty, thirty-five, and fifty, for a maximum of five classes.
Hawke remembered being a bit annoyed by the possibility of permadeath when he was creating a character. Now it was a lot more serious. Not dying had to be his first priority. His second priority was to get the hell out; he had no intention of loitering in the corpse-strewn chamber. The Arachnoids he had killed would be missed sooner or later. He needed to find a way out, but first he had to deal with a blinking prompt quietly demanding his attention: the quest log. He opened it.
QUEST: Escape the Catacombs
Your arrival to the Common Realm has been rather eventful. A malignant Necromancer sensed your Incarnation and used his fell magicks to steal your potential. Many other Eternals have fallen here; you can see their lifeless bodies all around you.
Your patron deity, Lumina Gloriana, Goddess of Light, has rescued you from their fate, but you are still in the midden where the corpses of your fellow Eternals are used as food for the vile Murk Arachnoids who serve the Necromancer. Those victims are doomed to respawn, die, and be devoured, over and over again, until their Final Death. Thanks to your goddess, you have been awakened, but if you die, you will be reborn in the same foul spot where you first appeared.
Quest Objective: You must reach the surface and locate a suitable area to designate as your Reincarnation (Respawn) Point.
Rewards: 100 XP, New Reincarnation Point.
There was no Accept/Reject prompt at the end. Hawke figured that that was the sort of quest that couldn’t be refused. Now that he knew what the stakes were, he sure as hell wanted to succeed.
He glanced at the piles of corpses. From what the Quest dialog said, all of those bodies belonged to Eternals like him. People from Earth like him. They had sat down to play a computer game and ended up there, killed on arrival, eaten by Arachnoids and then respawning, only to be killed and eaten again. Some of them could be his friends; his entire guild had started to play the game when he did.
There was nothing Hawke could do for those poor souls, at least not yet. But he would try to find a way to release them from this hellhole.
“I’ll come back for you,” he told the dead, and a new notification appeared:
QUEST ACCEPTED: To Save Your Brethren
You have sworn to come back for the Eternals trapped in the Necromancer’s lair. You must find a way to break the curse and release the Eternals’ captive souls.
Rewards: 5,000 XP, +100 Reputation from any released Eternals towards you, +100 Global Renown.
Failure Penalties: If the quest has not been fulfilled in a year or is Abandoned before then, you will have broken your oath: -100 to Global Renown, -1,000 XP.
“Guess I better watch what I say, even to myself,” Hawke muttered. Not only had the universe forced the Quest on him, he’d pay a hefty price if he failed. One thing was certain. Whether this was an insane game or some warped version of reality, life remained unfair. He had two Quests to fulfill, and one of them was a matter of life and death.
Four
Before he left the chamber, Hawke noticed a pair of glowing icons over two of the Murk spider-people he had killed. They looked like little bags or purses lying on their side, gold coins spilling out from them. The universal symbol for loot, in other words.
This may not be a game, but whoever is in charge has set it up that way, he thought as he approached the floating icons.
Opening one, he was unsurprised to see a mini-inventory: 3 copper coins and one Inferior Dagger that did a whole 1-3 points of damage. Everything went into his inventory. A cash entry appeared at the bottom of the inventory grid, showing him his current worth was those three copper coins. We all have to start somewhere, he told himself.
The other loot bag had two copper points, giving him a total of five. He searched the bodies as well and discovered the Arachnoids carried no cash; all they had were bags filled with dried meat – considering what they’d been doing, he had no intention of eating anything of theirs – three coils of rope, their five tridents (Shoddy Tridents, doing less damage than his sword) and five Inferior Daggers. He also found a Simple Lamp, which one of the arachnoids had left on the ground before joining in the fight.
He took everything in case he found somewhere to sell the items or break them down for crafting components. He had to think like a gamer if he had any chance of making it out of this fresh hell. Accumulating gear and power was the key to survival.
Casting Shield of Light on himself would have been nice, but being lit up like a torch didn’t sound like a good idea. He might not have a Stealth skill but he could at least try to be sneaky. As he set off in the direction the Arachnoids had come from, he tried to be as quiet as possible. His older brother was a Marine and had told him about how you were supposed to sneak up on a sentry:
Maintain your center of balance. Move slowly. Make sure your gear is tight, no dangling crap clinking against each other. Never rush blindly across unknown terrain. Move slowly. Scope your path before you start moving so you can avoid noisy stuff – or worse, mines or IEDs. Pay attention to your surroundings and make any ambient noises work for you. If the wind is moving branches around, for example, use that noise to cover the sounds you make. Move slowly. And carefully. Test every new step you make before you put your weight on it. And did I mention you’ve got to move slowly?
Hawke tried to follow the instructions, painfully aware of every clink and creak his breastplate and its leather fastenings made as he moved. He found that if he took his time and watched every step, the noise wasn’t as bad as when he walked normally. He was nowhere near Ninja level, though.
Congratulations! You have learned the Stealth skill at Level 1. Wearing heavy armor reduces your effective Stealth by 50%.
Taking his armor off would help, but his Worn Breast Plate had saved his life at least a couple of times during his last fight. He’d rather be armored than quiet.
The tunnel leading out of the chamber was about fifteen feet wide and lined with stone blocks, with a square roof supported by wooden pillars set in pairs every thirty or forty feet. There were tracks in the dust, which he quickly identified as belonging to the spider-things; the spiky marks couldn’t be anything else.
Congratulations! You have learned the Tracking skill at Level 1.
That Unlimited Potential perk was paying off big time. He could probably pick up any Skill he tried, although experimenting could wait for when he wasn’t trying to sneak past a lair of cannibalistic were-spiders. Hawke kept moving, trying to be as quiet as possible and grimacing every time his armor clinked. Yeah, a breast plate wasn’t the right outfit for sneaking around.
His hand rested o
n the hilt of his sword. If it came to it, he could fight. Memories of the frenzied battle made him a little queasy, though. Hurting other people hadn’t been something he enjoyed. He’d only been in a couple of drunken scuffles at bars. He’d gotten a broken nose in the first one and given the other guy a black eye; the other time, he and some other asshat had wrestled around for a bit before the bouncers separated and threw them out. He didn’t go out looking for trouble and hadn’t enjoyed finding it.
In games, sure, he’d happily slaughtered thousands of assorted critters, but those had been pixelated cartoons, lifeless bits of data. He’d never felt what it was like to cut something alive until now. Being hurt – really hurt, having skin and flesh torn open – had been just as bad. What choice did he have, though?
Despite his misgivings, Hawke continued walking – slowly and as stealthily as he could – towards what could turn into another fight. He was afraid, but not frozen by panic. Ben Velasco hadn’t thought of himself as being particularly brave. But he wasn’t Ben anymore, was he? When he played Hawke – he’d used the same character name and class in half a dozen different MMOs – he’d played him as the typical heroic paladin, not afraid to tank for an entire raid and get up in a final boss’ face to keep it busy while the damage-dealers did their thing. Maybe a part of him was still treating this situation as a game. And maybe that was the smartest thing to do. If he panicked or hesitated, he was going to end up piled on top of the dead bodies of his fellow Eternals.
The slow walk had another beneficial effect: his Endurance pool continued to increase. After a few minutes, it was back to full. He didn’t feel exhausted anymore, although he still felt like taking a nap. No sleep until you see the sky, he told himself, and kept going.
He passed two narrow tunnels branching off from the main one. They both led down, so he ignored them; he had no intention of going deeper underground. The main tunnel was slowly going up and curving to the left, so he stuck to it.
Soon after leaving the last side tunnel behind, he heard something: the weird buzzing-clacking sounds the Arachnoids made. Crap. He also noticed there was a light source around the next bend in the tunnel. Hawke moved even more slowly, sticking close to the inner side of the tunnel as it continued to curve to the left. He thought about drawing his sword but decided that making noise was more dangerous than being unarmed; in any case, he still had the shield at the ready.
He peeked around the corner and saw the tunnel ran straight for about sixty, seventy feet before opening up into a large chamber. The light of dozens of torches and several banked fires in the room let him see things in living color: houses made of stone, carved right into the chamber’s walls, were clearly visible, along with dozens of Arachnoids, some about the size of the workers he had killed, others tiny skittering things that must be children, and huge beasts easily twice as large. The giant Arachnoids were armed with angular single-edged swords that looked like oversized meat cleavers. They had glistening body armor and helmets, all made of some sort of chitinous material. Their starts were also impressive:
Murk Arachnoid
Level 3 Warrior
Health 48 Mana 23 Endurance 39
Hawke backed out of sight, moving as stealthily as he could. Besides the half dozen Warriors, he’d noticed several roasting spits set over fires. Empty spits. The spider people were planning a feast, and all that was missing was the corpse-meat the Workers he had killed were expected to bring home. If the fires were lit, they were expecting their food deliveries to arrive any second now. There was no way to sneak past that big chamber and he hadn’t seen any other way out.
He was screwed.
A moment later, he heard a woman’s voice in his head.
What the hell?
Who is this?
Five
Hearing voices in his head was barely among the top ten weirdest things that had happened to him since his arrival to the real Eternal Journey. Whoever that was, she could apparently hear his thoughts, so Hawke thought back:
Where are you?
The voice turned hopeful.
Nope, sorry.
Free you. You are a prisoner, then.
Hawke hated evasive and mysterious NPCs. Whoever this voice belonged to was behaving just like a computer-generated non-player character, meant to give him a hard time before providing some vital clue or item. If this had been a game, he might have told the voice to eff off.
Instead, he mentally replied I’m on my way and slowly and stealthily headed back the way he’d come.
Of the two tunnels he’d passed by, the one the voice wanted him to use was the smallest and grubbiest. Unlike the main branch, it was a natural opening, with uneven rocky walls. Its low ceiling required him to crouch down to avoid banging his un-helmeted head against it. After he had traveled a few dozen feet, he noticed it was narrowing down. Going on didn’t feel like a good idea.
Well, I sort would like to know a little more about you before I get myself much deeper into this. I can always try my luck in the other side tunnel.
Did you say thousand?
Well, he wanted information and he got it. Hawke considered Saturnyx’s words. He had lots of questions, but he supposed they could wait until he introduced himself. Good manners were important.
My name is Hawke Lightseeker, he said. He shared all the stuff he’d selected during character creation. I am a Paladin of Lumina Gloriana, goddess of Light. Who are you, Saturnyx? How can you still be alive after hundreds of years?
He’d been talking to a sword. An intelligent, talking sword good enough to be wielded by a demigod. He hadn’t heard of anything like it in the game demo or the opening cinematics, but Saturnyx sounded like a high-level, high-quality item, the sort of thing some first level scrub should never be allowed to find. Maybe this was his lucky day.
All right, Saturnyx. I’ll do my best to get you out of here.
A text box appeared in front of him, startling him enough to make him fall on his ass. The pain on his backside reminded him not to count the day as lucky until it was over.
You have accepted a new Quest!
QUEST: Claim the Demons-Bane
You have agreed to find the lost sword Saturnyx and accept her pledge to serve you.
Rewards: Access to the Powers and Abilities of Saturnyx Demons-Bane.
Failure Penalties: If the quest has not been fulfilled in six months or is Abandoned before then, you will have broken a Promise: -50 to Global Renown, -10 XP.
“Dammit,” he muttered as he sat up.
I’m great. Headed your way.
Sure, whatever you say.
He pressed on. The tunnel remained just big enough for him to make it through, although a couple of times he had to move sideways to get past a narrow spot. He could see why the arachnoids didn’t use this area; there was no way even the smallest adults would fit.
Hawke grunted. The way had begun to widen out a little bit and he’d started to feel good about things. What is it?
Why the hell didn’t you tell me about themt before now?
Twilight Templar (The Eternal Journey Book 1) Page 3