Spellcraft

by Andrew Beymer

  “Um, if you’re going to heal her then now would be a good time,” I said, watching Kris’s HP with growing alarm as it plummeted towards zero.

  “I can’t!” she said. “I told you I went with the whole stealth archer thing. My mana regen isn’t that fast. I don’t have anything to heal her with yet!”

  Okay. This was a new wrinkle I hadn’t anticipated. Also? Totally something I should’ve anticipated before I critically wounded my best friend.

  “But that’s like a low level spell! How could you not have enough mana?”

  “Stealth archer,” she said. “Not much use for healing spells or mana when you’re hiding in the shadows killing stuff with arrows and daggers.”

  “I guess it doesn’t matter anymore anyway,” I said as Kris gasped one final time and then she was gone as her health bar reached zero.

  “Shit,” the girl said. “I’m sorry about that.”

  “Which part?” I asked. “The part where you shot an arrow through her neck or the part where you couldn’t heal her?”

  The girl stood and pulled a dagger out. So much for the friendly conversation we’d been enjoying. “Y’know I’m about sick of the mouth on you.”

  “Yeah, I get that a lot.”

  That’s when something struck me. Well two things struck me. One quite literally and the other more figuratively. The literal thing that struck me was a dagger that was suddenly embedded in my arm. The thing that struck me figuratively speaking was that apparently my PVP immunity had finally worn off, and I'd wasted it mouthing off to this girl while she killed my best friend.

  “Huh,” I said. “That’s gonna hurt.”

  Then the blinding pain hit me and I realized that yup, the pain simulation in this game was as top notch as I'd feared it would be.

  I really should’ve turned down that pain sensitivity bar when I had the chance.

  26

  New Friends?

  I clutched at my arm and fell to my knees. The pain was so blinding that I couldn’t keep my balance. I pulled up my inventory and looked for something, anything, I could use to heal or fight. I wasn’t sure which I was going for in my blind panic.

  I had a weapon that’d be useless in a fight against this girl, and there was nothing else in my inventory but the mushrooms and flowers I'd been picking.

  Sure some of those were likely dangerous, and some of them probably had healing properties, but they’d have to be refined and put into a potion or something if I wanted to take advantage of the healing properties. Not to mention if there was something deadly in my inventory I’d probably have to apply it to my sword and try to land a hit against this girl, not happening, or convince her to eat it which also seemed pretty low on the probability list in the middle of combat.

  The healing properties of an unrefined item definitely wouldn’t be enough to save me if this crazy girl decided to introduce me to the unpleasant sensation of in-game death. Motherfucker. I really needed to figure out how to turn some of these reagents into useful shit!

  Though I was on the verge of losing everything I’d gathered. Including the Nhewb’s Blessing flowers that’d seemed so promising. If this chick killed me then it was lights out for everything in my inventory, and that almost hurt more than the dagger embedded in my arm.

  Almost, but not quite. That dagger hurt like a motherfucker.

  “Fuck that hurts!” I growled.

  Kris’s body started to go through the whole “decomposition in a matter of seconds” animation that told me she’d released to the nearest convenient graveyard. One moment Kris was whole, albeit a whole corpse, then her skin started to peel off and fade away along with all her major organs until only a skeleton was left. Even that quickly disappeared as it turned to dust that blew away on an invisible wind, leaving behind a small treasure chest that only served to remind me that all of my worldly possessions in the game were about to be up for grabs too.

  “She’s going to be pissed off that she lost her stuff,” I said. “We’ve never played a game where you could lose your shit like that before.”

  I knew shock was setting in. That was the only explanation for how I could be talking about Kris’s stuff when there was a dagger rammed into my arm. Having a dagger rammed into my arm wasn’t the kind of thing that was a normal occurrence in my world, for all that a surprise shanking was an ever present possibility on our level of the arcology.

  The girl was immediately on guard. Which struck me as odd considering I was pretty sure she was the one who’d put the dagger in my arm in the first place. She’d moved fast enough that I hadn’t seen the attack, but she was the only one in range.

  Yet she stared at the surrounding forest as though she expected an attack to come from the trees rather than from her hands. Weird, but then again I wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders right now.

  "We’ll be able to get that stuff for your friend if we manage to survive this encounter," the girl said.

  “We survive? I mean aren’t you going to survive a ganking you’re…”

  She glared at me and put a finger to her lips, so I shut the fuck up.

  It was around that time that I started to put two and two together. I'd assumed this girl was the one who'd stabbed me, but the way she was looking at the surrounding trees as though they held danger for both of us told a different story.

  She pulled her bow up and stared at those trees with an intensity typically reserved for enthusiastic arborists and dendrophiliacs who were about to reenact their favorite scene from Evil Dead.

  "I don't suppose you have any abilities that’d be useful in a fight?" she asked.

  I opened my mouth, but she rode right over me.

  "Of course you don't," she said. "What would I expect from a noob?”

  I considered giving her a piece of my mind, but she let loose with an arrow that flew into the trees. That seemed a touch ridiculous. It didn’t seem likely she’d hit anything considering all the trees in the way.

  That turned out to be a pretty noobish thought, for all that I kept insisting I wasn’t a noob. That loosed arrow was followed by a cry as someone wearing a Horizon Dawn tabard crashed out of stealth and into the clearing.

  Right. She didn’t have to worry about hitting any of the trees if there was someone in stealth mode standing between the arrow and those trees.

  "I knew it!" she said. "Those bastards are out to get us!"

  "Fuck this hurts," I said, looking down at the dagger sticking out of my arm.

  “Keia you bitch!" the woman at the other end of the clearing screamed. No doubt she was trying to be intimidating, but the intimidation factor was knocked down just a touch by the arrow sticking out of her stomach.

  Keia glared at the girl and smiled a little half smile that looked downright predatory.

  "Well, well," she said. "Sereh? Is that you?"

  I was more and more worried as Keia walked over to the girl instead of running away. Sure there was just the one girl right now, but if there was one Horizon Dawn person hunting us then there could be more out there in the trees ready to move in for a gang gank.

  "What are you doing?" I asked.

  "It's okay," Keia said. "You can come over here. Sereh’s not going to hurt you."

  “I’m not worried about her,” I said. “I’m worried about her friends sneaking around out there moving in for the kill.”

  I expected that raiding party to appear and kill us painfully and slowly at any moment. I'd become very pain averse after my first experience with the sensation in the game.

  Which reminded me that I needed to turn down that pain slider. So I thought of it and dialed it down as far as it would go. I knew from Kris’s example that it wouldn’t get rid of the pain entirely, but I figured it was a hell of a lot better than getting the full blast.

  “Don’t worry about her friends,” Keia said. “Sereh likes to work alone, don’t you Sereh?”

  She reached down and twisted the arrow in Sereh’s stomach. Which caused the g
irl to scream out in pain. I guess she hadn’t discovered the slider, and I had no intention of telling someone who’d lodged a dagger in my arm about that particular open secret.

  Had nobody who played this game in early access actually bothered to sit down and figure out how to play the game?

  “Come on,” Keia said. “I’ll keep you safe from her.”

  I bristled at the thought that I needed anyone to keep me safe, but she had a point. So I stood and cradled my injured arm. The injury wasn’t as bad as when I’d had that slider turned up, it was more of a dull ache now, but I was still painfully aware of it.

  Even knowing on an abstract level that I hadn't actually been stabbed with a dagger, that this was the game's representation of a dagger being lodged in my arm that was stimulating the pain centers of my brain, wasn't enough to completely separate me from the dulled world of hurt currently being visited on those pain centers.

  “So. Sereh," Keia said, getting down on her knees in front of the girl I was fairly certain was the source of my current pain. "So nice to see you out here."

  "I've already told the others where you are," the girl spat. “I might work alone, but Nilbog isn’t that far! You're going to regret this. You and your noob boyfriend are going down! I owe both of you!”

  Keia turned to me and smiled a thin smile.

  "You know each other?"

  Now that I was close enough to get a good look, and incidentally now that my brain was sort of getting used to the pain, I realized that yes. I did know this girl.

  “I’ve had a brief encounter with her,” I said. “Though the last time we met I was watching her getting carted off by goblin guards after she tried hitting me in a dark alley while I still had my PVP protection,” I said.

  “You tried hitting someone with PVP protection in town?” Keia asked, letting out a low whistle. “I thought you were smarter than that, Sereh.”

  “He tricked me!” she spat.

  "So you managed to break free?" I asked. "Nice trick, that, or did you have your buddies pay your way out?”

  "Shut up noob,” she spat. "When we get our hands on you…"

  "Oh I know all about what your guild leader wants to do when he gets his hands on me. Tell me, does he do that with all the young guys who come through his territory, or am I special?"

  "Fuck you," Sereh said.

  "Oh my," I said trying my best to sound scandalized. I put my hand to my chest. "First your guild master, and now you want to get in on the action? Your guild really is naughty, aren't they?"

  Her eyes bulged out. I'd scored a hit. Honestly if I'd met this girl under circumstances that didn’t involve her trying to kill me I might’ve been interested. Unfortunately that whole trying to kill me thing as part of a collaboration with Horizon knocked her down a couple of notches on the hotness scale.

  "So what were you really doing out here Sereh?" Keia asked. "Were you following me around, or are you following this one?"

  "You can go fuck yourself too,” Sereh said.

  Keia shook her head. "That's not very nice."

  I was hit with another wave of blinding pain. Why was I getting hit with blinding pain? I turned that damn slider all the way down, but white stars danced in front of my vision. I looked down to see the dagger was gone from my arm, leaving a gaping bleeding hole where it’d been. Keia held it in her hand and gave it a little whirl.

  Huh. I guess that answered the question of whether or not the lowered pain slider took all pain in the game down a notch or only meant that pain you experienced went down faster than it would normally. And I’d been totally right about the physical trial to figure that out sucking big time.

  "Sorry about that," she said. “You’re not the only one who can pull the distraction play. Mind if I borrow your dagger?"

  "Sure thing," I managed to choke out, wobbling just a little.

  "Thanks so much," Keia said, looking down at the glowing Horizon Syndicate dagger with clear distaste.

  She bent over Sereh who glared up at her.

  "So I figure this can go one of two ways," Keia said. "You and I both know the pain simulation in this game has diminishing returns after awhile.”

  She glanced at me, and the meaning was clear. I was to shut the fuck up about turning that pain slider down. Not that I’d had any intention of telling and making this any easier on the bitch.

  “I think we also both know those diminishing returns don't matter a damn bit if someone keeps creating new pain,” she said, which dovetailed nicely with my own experience. That’d also be a good way for someone to continue hurting someone who knew about the pain slider, for that matter. This girl really was a devious woman after my own heart. “So do you want me to make this quick? Or do you want me to make it hurt?"

  Keia punctuated her words by stabbing Sereh in parts of her body that weren’t critical to her continuing survival. At least not in the game. If she’d been stabbed like that in the real world then it would’ve been lights out from the shock alone.

  "What are you doing out here Sereh?" Keia asked. "Are you following me, or were you following the noobs? And if you were following the noobs around, what the hell did they do to you to warrant being followed?"

  “Torian put a contract out on them," she said. "Finding you hanging out with them was icing on the cake considering the contract he has on you.”

  Keia seemed to think about that for a moment.

  "Thanks for being truthful," Keia said. "At least I'm pretty sure you were being truthful, so I’ll make this quick."

  She plunged the dagger into Sereh's neck. The girl stared at us with pure hatred for the moment it took for her to expire, gurgling as she tried to say something and completely and utterly failed at getting it out.

  The fact that her voicebox and throat and other major things she needed to talk had just been messily severed probably had a lot to do with that gurgling. Talk about realistic simulation!

  Keia leaned down and wiped the bloody dagger off on the girl’s clothes. Then she grimaced and shook her head.

  "This game makes player versus player combat a lot messier than I care for," she said.

  “A lot more painful too,” I grunted, still pressing my hand on the hole in my arm.

  I wondered if it would heal on its own, or if the injury was severe enough that I'd have to have someone fix it. Though with the way my day had been going it seemed more likely that I’d die and get a trip to the graveyard before either of those options happened.

  27

  Toxic Gear

  "Oh," Keia said. "Sorry about that. Let me help you."

  I shied away. She took another step towards me, and I scrambled back as I thought about the way she’d "helped" Kris. She got a bemused look as she took another step, her hands glowing with that fitful glow that hadn’t been quite enough to save Kris’s ass.

  Finally she made an irritated noise in the back of her throat.

  “What the hell’s the problem?” she asked.

  “I’m thinking about how you helped Kris,” I said.

  “Seriously?” she said, the glow disappearing from her hands. “I pulled the dagger out. It’s not like your wound is going to heal around it or anything.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling like an idiot. “I guess you do have a point.”

  “Of course I have a point,” she said. “Also I’m the only person in the area who has any healing ability, so I’m your only hope unless you want to wait for that to heal on its own.”

  I glanced down at the wound. It seemed a little smaller, but I wasn’t sure if that was wishful thinking on my part, or if the thing really was healing up and getting smaller.

  “How long would it take for the wound to heal on its own?” I asked.

  “Faster than in the real world, but way slower than you’d think for a video game,” Keia said.

  “Shit,” I said. “I guess I’ll take my chances with the healing in that case.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Thank you for being so magn
animous in letting me help you.”

  “Well to be fair it’s sort of your fault the dagger is there in the first place,” I said as she leaned over me. That was good for another glare.

  “How the hell is this my fault?” she asked.

  “If you hadn’t stopped us then that Sereh chick wouldn’t have caught up with us,” I said.

  “Did you ever stop to think that she was stalking you this whole time, and if you’d gone deeper in the woods that would’ve meant no one around to hear you scream when your immunity wore off which is what she was waiting for?”

  “Not true,” I said, not liking how likely that scenario sounded.

  “How the hell is that not true?” Keia said. “She was clearly following you. She even said I was a bonus.”

  “Yeah, but I’m sure there are some woodland critters or something that would’ve heard our screams,” I said.

  Keia blinked. Then a smile cracked her face. Then she was giggling, and very shortly both of us were laughing our asses off.

  “You’ve got a point, I guess,” she said. “Now come here. I’ll heal that wound.”

  “Are you sure you have enough mana to do it this time?" I asked.

  "Spoken like a man who doesn't want to get his ass healed," she said. “Besides, if I run out of mana I can always kiss it and make it better.”

  I shivered. There was something intriguing about the thought of this hottie kissing my wound to make it better, for all that I was pretty sure she was joking around since kissing a gaping wound wasn’t my idea of a good time.

  Maybe it was hers. I didn’t judge, much. Or maybe she was clumsily flirting. Which also felt odd. I thought guys were the ones who were supposed to be clumsy with their flirting while the ladies stood there and tolerated it.

  At least that’s how it always worked at the dances they had at our school.

  "Uncle," I said. "But please. Do your worst."

  "On it," she replied.

  Her hands sparkled. Sparks danced up and down over the wound in my arm, and a moment later I felt better. My arm was still a little pink where the dagger poked me, and there was a scabbed over spot there, but I could move it around without triggering what the game considered new stabs of pain which had the unfortunate side effect of hitting me with that pain at full blast.