Spellcraft

by Andrew Beymer

  Spellcraft

  Andrew Beymer

  Contents

  1. Captured

  2. Hail to the King, Baby

  3. Crime and Punishment

  4. But Mostly Punishment

  5. After Action

  6. Big Announcement

  7. IRL Danger

  8. Stupid Hot

  9. Launch Day

  10. Under Attack?

  11. Player Killers

  12. Griefing the Griefers

  13. Good Relations With the Goblins, I Have

  14. Expeditious Retreat

  15. Gatherer

  16. Combat Craft

  17. Reagents

  18. NPCs

  19. Trouble Brewing

  20. Involuntary PvP

  21. Influence

  22. Hunted

  23. Player Versus Planning

  24. Into the Woods

  25. Ineffective Healing

  26. New Friends?

  27. Toxic Gear

  28. Smelly Salvation

  29. New Plan

  30. Scouting

  31. Mine Entrance

  32. Mining

  33. Spellcraft Unlocked

  34. Spellcrafting

  35. Enemy-Shattering Kaboom

  36. Improvised Explosive Craft

  37. Encumbrance

  38. Back to Town

  39. Discovered

  40. Sucking Face

  41. Bully the Bullies

  42. Forged in Stupidity

  43. Discretion, Valor, etc.

  44. The Magic District

  45. Trelor’s Oddments

  46. The IOI Gambit

  47. One Word: Potions

  48. The Auction House

  49. Selling Out

  50. Consequences

  51. Corpse Run

  52. Gathering Attention

  53. Payday

  54. R-E-S-P-E-C-T

  55. Protection Racket

  56. Exchange Rate

  57. Business Plan

  58. Powerleveling

  59. Explosive Rescue

  60. Old Friends

  61. Escape to the Underground

  62. AI Horror

  63. Down in the Underground

  64. Blackreach on Steroids

  65. Puny Gods

  66. Economic Warfare

  67. Means of Production

  68. Kneel Before Conlan!

  69. Recipes

  70. To the Skies

  71. Supply Run

  72. Overeager

  73. Big Surprise

  74. Battle

  75. Under Siege

  76. Enemy at the Gates

  77. Enemy Among Us

  78. Into the Air

  79. Ass Saving

  80. Back to Nilbog

  81. The Duke

  82. Back to School

  Epilogue 1: Middle Managers

  Epilogue 2: Dark Redemption

  Author’s Note

  Thanks for reading!

  Spellcraft

  By Andrew Beymer

  Copyright 2020 Andrew Beymer

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  First digital edition published by Andrew Beymer March 2020

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  For more about me and my other projects check out my website at http://www.andrewbeymer.com!

  Created with Vellum

  1

  Captured

  “Ow! Y’know I’m perfectly capable of walking up these stairs without you jabbing that spear in my back!”

  The guard grunted and jabbed me in the back again. Not a pleasant feeling, all things considered.

  I double checked that my live stream was going. If I was going to suffer for this then I wanted to make sure it was worth it. I grinned as I saw my usual few thousand viewers, though the numbers were going… down.

  Fuckity fuck fuck!

  “We’re losing eyes,” Kris said, her voice appearing in my head in our group chat even though she was nowhere to be seen and I didn’t have any obvious headset on.

  No matter how long I used the Lotus hardware that was still a hell of a mindfuck.

  “Just wait,” I said, my voice only carrying in that group chat and not to the NPCs all around. “They think they know what’s going to happen here.”

  “I’m worried they do know what’s going to happen here,” Kris said.

  “Yeah, well we’ll see about that,” I said.

  Those numbers would start going up soon enough. I hoped.

  The guards poked and prodded me all the way to the top of the long ivory stairs. I winced to think of the number of elephants who’d been sacrificed to get that much material, then reminded myself this was, after all, a video game where it’s not like any real elephants had been harmed in the making of this staircase.

  We reached the top step. The smell was the first thing I noticed. Incense of some sort burning and wafting across my nostrils.

  “Smells like a head shop up here,” I said, glancing around.

  The creation of the Lotus hardware had necessitated the creation of a whole new form of art: Nasal Foley Artists. Which might seem like an interesting job until you stop and think about the necessity of enduring not only the pleasant smells that went into a simulation like Lotus, but all the unpleasant smells that had to be painstakingly researched until the developers knew exactly which neurons to tickle in someone’s brain to, say, give them the impression they were sniffing dragon fewmets.

  Go ahead and tap that to bring up the dictionary on your reader. I’ll wait here for you.

  I didn’t envy those poor bastards that job. Still, I could appreciate the hard work that’d gone into making me think I was smelling anything at all.

  One final prod and I was at the top of the stairs with an impressive view and a few small holes in my back that I didn’t appreciate.

  I could see the entire throne room from up here. It was a massive gaudy thing. All white with glowing crystals. Like the sort of Star Wars high fantasy fusion ripoff that’d been in vogue in everything back in the early 1980s when every second rate director with half a budget was looking to cash in on the sci-fi trend George Lucas launched.

  I hadn’t been close to being alive back then. My parents talked about that decade with fondness, even though they were born years too late to even be an itch in their dads’ balls when the ‘80s were still a going concern.

  The crowd was even more impressive. If the room looked like something out of a Conan/Star Wars hybrid knockoff then the people down below were right at home. The only word that came to mind as I got a look at them was resplendent. The artist who’d designed this room had clearly gone a little hog wild doing the costumes.

  The rich assholes down there who usually spent most of their time with their lips firmly connected to the king’s ass in this game world were looking up at me with looks I’d describe as “rapacious anticipation.”

  They knew what was about to happen, and they were looking forward to it. I rather liked having my head attached to my neck, but it looked like they were rather excited about its impending removal.

  The guards threw me roughly to the ground. I felt every bit of pain as I hit that ground. This was all in my head, but wasn’t everything in your head, technically speaking? If your head was where the world was processed then where did the line get drawn between something between your ears being fake and real?

  It was an existential question that’d vexed gaming journalists and real journalists alike since the Lotus hardware launched and started to rapidly change civilization as humanity knew it, but none of that was my concern right now.

  I had a king to depose, and the people who made this game weren’t going to be
happy about what I was doing considering I was supposed to die here.

  “Your majesty,” I said, trying to hide the pain and the wince that came along with speaking. “So nice to finally meet you.”

  “Nice?” the king growled. “You’ve been causing me far too much trouble, youngling, and it’s high time we take care of that. I’m going to enjoy dealing with this. Personally.”

  The low hum from the assembled court below rose to a dull roar. Clearly they thought they were going to get a hell of a show today. Clearly this was the sort of bloodthirsty thing they were used to.

  Basically they were reacting like some unpaid English major intern’s idea of a bloodthirsty rabble because said intern had skimmed a couple of books about the French Revolution and maybe went through the Cliff’s Notes for A Tale of Two Cities while coming up with the backstory for this scenario, then channeled that thirdhand knowledge into the assembled throngs below.

  I well knew how bloodthirsty the Blood King’s court was. With a hack name like Blood King the whole bloodthirsty thing sort of followed naturally. Plus I’d seen plenty of play throughs from players who got to this point in the module. It never ended well for the unlucky bastards stupid enough to get captured.

  This was supposed to be a fail state, after all. The ultimate middle finger from the Horizon developers where you were supposed to walk with a hop, skip, and a jump to your in-game death. It was the sort of sequence you couldn’t back out of, because the assholes who made this module apparently had a sadistic streak a mile wide.

  Which was about par for the course for Horizon. Sadistic or dangerously incompetent was their MO. Except for the times when they went for sadistic and dangerously incompetent.

  The king, an aged dude who looked like he’d kicked some ass when he was younger to get his ass on that throne in the first place, stood. Nowadays his once wide shoulders had trouble holding up his voluminous crimson robes that looked like the Lucasfilm costume department had a rummage sale after filming wrapped on Return of the Jedi. I couldn’t imagine this frail old man holding a sword despite knowing he was one hell of a tough raid boss in this module, but he held a hand out for his sword regardless.

  “Moving in,” Kris said. “Give the word and I’m in the fight.”

  “Got it,” I said.

  I pointedly didn’t glance at a hint of movement behind the king on the conveniently obvious walkway that ran behind the throne. That walkway wasn’t a great design for a king who spent a great deal of time terrified of assassins, but this whole room was built to the specifications of game designers who wanted to provide their players with an interesting experience, and not to the specifications of a mad king who was obsessed with preventing assassinations.

  Which meant there had to be a convenient method of reaching the king to assassinate him that would be obvious even to gamers who had all the intelligence and personality of a box of rocks, and fuck whether or not that convenient method of assassination was internally consistent with the rest of the game scenario.

  The king’s hand twitched. He hit the guard beside him with an irritated glance. The guard, a cyborg resplendent in deep purple robes that were also reminiscent of a certain emperor’s guards while being different enough that Horizon wouldn’t get the pants sued off of them by the mighty mouse, stayed still.

  “What are you waiting for?” the king croaked. “When I hold my hand out like this it means I want my sword. And if I wiggle my fingers it means you’re one step away from the scrap heap unless you do my bidding. Now what’s it going to be?”

  I couldn’t help but smile at the king’s irritation. After all, if he was this irritated it meant I was doing something right.

  I stood, which earned me some irritated hisses from the guards. They raised their spears, and I winced as I anticipated more pokes to get me down on my knees again.

  The king turned and eyed me with open disdain, but blessedly he held up a hand to stop the guards from ventilating my torso. Which I was grateful for. I knew I’d have to endure pain to do this, but I wasn’t all that jazzed about it.

  “Would you like me to help you with that?” I asked, desperately hoping he’d rise to the bait.

  Even though the good king rising to the bait might very shortly result in my untimely demise. Thems were the breaks when you were trying to break all the rules in the interest of fucking over a soulless murdering multinational entertainment conglomerate.

  2

  Hail to the King, Baby

  The king eyed me with the sort of suspicion usually reserved for monarchs staring at a bunch of assholes talking about things like republicanism or guillotines. Which is to say he was annoyed, but cautious since I was confident in a spot where I had no right to it.

  “How could you possibly help me retrieve my sword?” the king asked.

  “Easy. You’re doing the whole summoning thing wrong.”

  “I’m doing it wrong?”

  “Yup. You just hold your hand out like this,” I said, holding my hand out just as the king had a moment ago. “And give your fingers a little wiggle like this.”

  I wiggled my fingers just so. It wasn’t necessary, but I liked a bit of theatricality for the people watching my stream at home. The more I hammed it up the more they’d tell their friends they needed to get a look at the asshole who was about to get beheaded by the cyberguards.

  The more eyes I had on my livestream the more fun the big reveal would be. Because someone was losing their head before this was all over, but it sure as hell wasn’t going to be me if I had anything to say about it.

  A bright red light set into the cyberguard’s chest, the one holding the king’s sword, turned a more soothing blue color. The not-quite-man and not-quite-machine obligingly turned and handed the king’s sword over to me.

  The king stared, flummoxed, as I held the thing high and got a feel for the weapon. Yeah, that was the sort of look monarchs got when the revolutionaries stopped talking about the guillotine and started setting up their beheading implements of choice.

  Though in this case my beheading implement of choice was the king’s own sword. The thing was a real cyberpunk masterpiece. Translucent blue with circuits running all through it. It was light to the touch even though it was the most powerful weapon in this game module. The sort of weapon a player wasn’t supposed to get their hands on under any circumstances.

  “How did you… What did you… That’s impossible!”

  “That’s only impossible if you’re not the king,” I said, turning to the former king with a wink. “And I’m the king now.”

  I whirled around and sliced the cybernetic sword through the cybernetic guards who’d been poking and prodding me all the way up the stairs, then finished by shoving the sword into the former king’s stomach. Surprise remained on the old man’s face until the light went out of his eyes.

  Like it literally went out of his eyes. He had obvious cybernetic implants that made his eyes glow a dull purple. At least until he pulled a Terminator and that glow slowly went dead.

  It would’ve been a pretty cool effect if it wasn’t a shameless ripoff of something James Cameron had done better decades ago.

  Meanwhile I was more impressed with how easy it was to gut the old king. I’d hoped it would be that easy, but I’d also figured there might be something in the module to stop me from doing what I’d just done despite all my preparation for this oh-so-sweet moment.

  Horizon wasn’t above shoddy game design that involved invisible walls to stop gamers from doing what they weren’t supposed to do, and killing the king was right at the top of the list of things players weren’t supposed to be able to do in this module.

  Whatever. Long live the king, and right now that meant long live me.

  “Hail to the king, baby,” I said, then I jerked the sword up to where the old king’s heart should’ve been, assuming it hadn’t been replaced by some cybernetic implant at some point.

  Best to be sure. The king might’ve gotten in a ba
r fight with some Nausicaans in his youth, after all.

  Something dropped down from the walkway above. Kris stepped forward looking like pure death. I figured it was a damn good thing Kris was on my side considering just how unhappy she looked.

  “Did you have to kill him?” she asked in a whine that didn’t at all jive with the looming brooding look she had going.

  “Well yeah?” I said. “That’s sort of the point.”

  “But I was about to launch my big distracting attack!”

  I sighed and set the blade into the floor. The tip sank into the fantastical bone because it could cut through anything in the game.

  “Yeah, but I’d rather do it my way,” I said. “After all, I’m the one who figured out we could dupe the control crystal and use it to take control of the cyberguards.”