by G. D. Penman
He quickly selected Halo before he could second-guess himself, then opened his eyes.
The hole to the next deep still hung open before him. The drop was just far enough that a torch wouldn’t cast a light to the bottom.
Murovan night vision came to the rescue again. There was a shallow covering of water across the next level’s floor, murky enough that he might have mistaken it for the surface itself if he couldn’t see the sheen and ripples. Arching tree roots reared up out of the water here and there, and more trailed and looped out from the muddy walls.
Martin probably would have jumped down to splash in the giant puddle without a second thought if he hadn’t seen a poor Sythvan flailing as they sank into the swamp just underneath the entrance hole.
Taking a careful grip on the roots by the Deep Gate, he swung himself down, hoping yet again that Lindsay hadn’t gone charging in head-first.
Thirteen
The Moss on the Morass
Martin’s stamina bar began to shrink. The longer he was hanging from the roof of the damp tunnel he’d just found himself in, the faster it seemed to decline.
In a panic, he fumbled his way across to the nearest wall and worked his way down that concave surface until he reached the water. He dipped a toe in, tentatively, watching ripples spread out in every direction at his touch. Then he lowered his foot in to check the surface below.
His foot sank into the cold mud and he was startled to feel it pressing up between his toes. A few tentative presses later, he let go of the wall and stood up.
“Will you stop messing around and help me? I’ve been stuck here for hours. Please. Dude. Help!”
Martin had sincerely hoped that the other player had been too distracted to notice him, but now he plodded back towards the entrance, carefully testing the ground with each step.
He worked his way in a slow circle around the partially submerged Sythvan, testing the ground to find the limits of whatever quicksand or bog was hidden beneath the placid water.
A tooltip popped up informing him that this new companion was a level four knave named… Snekboi. Martin loathed him already, just for the name. His constant prattling didn’t help either.
“Dude. What are you doing? Dude. Help me? Dude! Say something! Come on, dude.”
Martin sighed, “I am trying to think of a way to get you out without getting myself stuck too. Will you just stop for a second?”
Snekboi let out an obnoxious bark of laughter.
“I jumped right in, dude. There were no warnings, no nothing. This game is brutal. It’s totally awesome, but… man, it’s really out to get you, you know? Like, everything is a trap. You got to be cunning, dude. Got to outthink it.”
“I’m trying to outthink it.” Martin fixed him with a stare. “Just give me a second to outthink it, yeah?”
The knave looked away first.
“Right. Sorry, dude. Take your time. I mean, I’ve been here for like, three hours with nobody to talk to, but whatever. You have your me-time.”
There was no way Martin could reach Snekboi, not with his stubby little rat limbs. He might have been light enough to creep out onto the soft mud without breaking the surface tension, but the moment he tried to pull on the heavier Sythvan, he would just lever himself down into the same slowly sinking fate.
He could try to head back to town and get some long poles or rope to drag Snekboi out. He might even be able to round up some low-level players with a bit more strength than him to help out, but that would take time. At least an hour to organize everything. He couldn’t spare an hour, not when Lindsay was down in these fog-clogged tunnels by herself. There was a faster solution.
Martin crouched down to look out over the surface of the water. “What happens when you try to swim to the side?”
“Dude, every time I move, I start sinking again. It is totally sinister and stuff. It is trying to make me kill myself.”
Snekboi was straining to look at Martin, while also trying not to move his body. It was kind of funny, in a tragic sort of way.
It was like this sometimes with his coworkers. When there was a really obvious solution they’d get annoyed at him for pointing out, he had to lead them to it step by step.
“And you’ve been stuck here for three hours?”
“Yeah, dude. It sucks. I even tried logging out and back in again and I just ended up right back in the mud.”
Snekboi’s straining had caused him to sink down another inch or so, although he didn’t seem to have noticed. Martin had wasted enough time on this stranger already.
“Have you thought about maybe just dying?” he asked.
“Dude, what? No? I’m not going to die just because of some mud. Come on, help me out.”
Without being too obvious, Martin strolled around the edges of the sinking mud. It forced Snekboi to keep turning. Corkscrewing himself deeper into the mud.
“If you die, you’ll be back in the game in half an hour. That’s much quicker than I could put together a rescue.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want to die!” Snekboi was shouting now, drawing the attention of whatever might be lurking out in the cloudy tunnels. “I heard somebody say that if you die then the dungeon takes you over and makes you evil and hunt other players or some junk. I don’t want to do that. I hate PvP games.”
Martin started climbing up the roots at the side of the tunnel, glancing back at Snekboi. Calculating the angles. “Sometimes having PvP in a game can actually be a really helpful tool. It can give you solutions that you might not normally have.”
Snekboi was straining his neck back to look right up where Martin was dangling above him, swinging by his sword hand.
“Like what?”
“Like this.”
Martin cast Rebuke.
Snekboi vanished under the water’s surface with a loud pop, like the cork coming out of a bottle in reverse. The bog had stopped toying with its food and finally swallowed the morsel whole.
[Snekboi suffers 1 water environmental damage]
[Snekboi suffers 1 water environmental damage]
[Snekboi suffers 1 water environmental damage]
[Snekboi suffers 1 water environmental damage]
Every sixth of a second the same message popped up, flooding Martin’s screen, over and over.
[Snekboi suffers 1 water environmental damage]
[Snekboi suffers 1 water environmental damage]
That was enough wasted time. He swung himself well clear of the drowning Sythvan and set off along the tunnel in what seemed to be the most promising of the two directions it might lead.
With a little bit of distance, the notifications slowed and stopped. He had already saved Snekboi from another wasted hour; he didn’t feel the need to hang around to see the last bubble rise.
But still, despite all the justifications Martin had created for his actions, he couldn’t deny that there was some dark satisfaction when he got the message:
[Your Sin has increased by 1]
A quick glance confirmed that he was still, just barely, above the watermark as far as Sin went and that his class hadn’t changed on him again. Then Martin went sloshing off down the tunnel once more.
Given what he now knew about the way Strata was put together, and the malevolence of the people running things, Martin made slow progress through the flooded tunnels of Deep Two.
Somewhat predictably, there were several more patches of quicksand – or, more accurately, quick-mud – hidden beneath the stagnant waters. Martin soon got into the habit of trailing along the side of the tunnel with one arm already raised to grab a root when he inevitably started sinking.
Even with those precautions, he still couldn’t shake the feeling that there was probably something evil lurking just under the water’s murky surface; some fantasy version of a crocodile just waiting to snap onto his leg, or some noxiously venomous fish covered in lethal spines.
The anticipation was probably worse than the fright was going to be when some
thing finally happened, but knowing that did nothing to ease the tension. If anything, waiting for the other shoe to drop added another layer of irritation. This was what the game was designed to do to him, and he was falling for it like every other rube. He understood the trick and he was still falling for it.
The simmer of anger was useful. It helped to drive the paralyzing chill of fear away. It was fuel to keep his brain churning.
Stonework showed in patches behind the muddy walls of the tunnels: intricate carvings, smeared with much. It was like the whole deep had once been carefully constructed before flooding and overgrowth filled in the corners. If the stone had still been bare, the echoed shouts from up ahead probably would have reached him sooner. Someone was fighting.
Lindsay.
Martin threw caution to the wind and ran. If there was a fight going on, the odds were good that Lindsay was right in the middle of it. He couldn’t recall drawing his sword, but there it was in his hand when he glanced down. It was strange to have new instincts slotting into place so easily.
The tunnel opened up into a partially-submerged chamber, a great spherical room almost the size of the Beachhead cave, with the entrances arrayed around the equator and heaped mud within the stone confines providing a ramp down to the swamp at the bottom.
Across the curve of the roof, roots were bursting through the cracks just as they had in the mud-walled tunnels. Martin took it all in with a glance then skidded down the slippery slope towards the brawl.
Aquatic monstrosities were what Martin had been expecting, but Strata had managed to surprise him again. At the center of the melee there stood a creature somewhere between moss and man; a giant construct of swamp-weed, half-rotten root tangles, caked mud and vine-wrapped hunks of stone. Faceless and furious, it swung its huge blunt arms at Lindsay as she ducked away.
[MISS]
There were two other players arrayed around the beast, up to their knees in the troubled waters. One was a Wulvan, towering almost as tall as the gargantuan plant-creature’s shoulders. The Wulvan was surrounded by a nimbus of golden light and his hands were empty, so Martin marked him as a martyr.
The other one, a Sythvan, was a little harder to place. She was wearing robes over her golden scales, but they were neither the flamboyant starter robes of the invoker or the white ones of the hierophant. They looked like leather at this distance, but he didn’t have the time to go prodding at them. Until she cast something – or he found a moment when they weren’t in the middle of a fight to prompt her character details to appear – Martin couldn’t be certain.
Lindsay tripped over a hidden root as she danced around the Faceless Morass and splashed face-down into the water.
[Tesra suffers 2 environmental bludgeoning damage]
That was all the opening the brutal vegetation needed. It raised both arms above its head and was about to smash her to pieces when Martin bellowed, “Hey, swamp thing! Over here!”
It looked up in surprise as he skidded down the slope and he laughed as he cast Halo with a thought and a flick of his wrist. The sudden blast of light illuminated every dark corner of the room. Martin was just glad that the light exploded out from behind him or he’d be just as blind as everyone else.
[Faceless Morass is blinded]
The Morass rocked backwards, letting out a wail that sounded like the grating of stones and clapping the fingerless stumps of its arms over the bland topology of its mossy face. Apparently, it did have something like eyes somewhere in there.
Lindsay was back on her feet and moving again, coughing up a beak’s worth of water as she ran around behind the Morass to use her backstabbing abilities again.
The other two had been taken by surprise by Martin’s Halo but they seemed to be recovering well. Martin had no idea what the martyr would look like in the game, but his assumption of some sort of bare-fisted monk seemed to have been in error. The Wulvan’s clawed hands never raised from his sides, but that golden aura lashed out like a flurry of fists, pummeling the Morass with blow after blow.
[Faceless Morass suffers 5 light damage]
[Faceless Morass suffers 4 light damage]
[Faceless Morass suffers 6 light damage]
If they were going to be landing lots of small hits, then Martin’s Rite of Retribution was going to come in handy to give them a boost. He activated it just before he got into striking distance and made his own clumsy hack into the writhing central mass of the Morass.
[Faceless Morass suffers 16 slashing damage]
That extra strength was really going to make a difference going forward, even if he hadn’t gotten the critical hit he was hoping for.
Martin hefted his sword again, ready to take another swing before the shifting tendrils of half-rotten plant matter reformed its stony armor, but the wounded Morass swatted him away with a suddenness that surprised them all.
[Skaife suffers 28 bludgeoning damage]
Numbness slammed through his body. Martin went flying across the dank water and for one awful moment he wondered if he was just going to skip across the surface like a tossed stone until he hit the wall. It was almost a relief when he sliced through the surface to land on a cloying, soft cushion of thick mud.
By the time Martin had resurfaced and scooped the slime from his eyes, the Morass’ sight had returned too. It was trading blows with the martyr, who barely seemed to flinch as the mighty trunks of its arms swung down. He held up his hands in supplication and trusted to that golden glow to keep the brutal blows from connecting.
[Jericho BLOCKS 24 bludgeoning damage]
[Jericho BLOCKS 26 bludgeoning damage]
Martin spat mud and charged back in, relieved to find he still had his sword in a white-knuckled grip. In pursuit of Jericho, the Morass had spun away, and Martin found himself running up alongside Lindsay at the beast’s stony backside. Her daggers lashed out, drawing nothing but sparks and echoed grunts of frustration from its armored hide.
“Can I offer you a lift?” Martin smirked.
“Finally!” Lindsay cackled. “What took you so long?”
She splashed back a few feet, then ran at Martin. He dropped to one knee and held up his empty paw like it was a step. As she leapt, he cast Rebuke, and she was flung up to the same level as the Morass’ head.
With a screech of triumph, Lindsay hammered her daggers down into the soft moss and tangled vines of its neck.
[CRITICAL HIT: DOUBLE DAMAGE]
[Faceless Morass suffers 36 piercing damage]
Martin waited for a moment, expecting her to fall down, but both daggers seemed to be lodged in the Morass pretty solidly. With her safely out of the way, and the Morass’ attention turned towards Jericho, Martin renewed his attacks.
[BLOCKED]
[BLOCKED]
[BLOCKED]
The stone armor that had thwarted Lindsay was turning aside his sword just as easily. Damage just wasn’t cutting it – figuratively and literally. Martin cast Celestial Strike, waited a moment to see his sword light up, then hammered it home in one lunging thrust.
[CRITICAL HIT]
[Faceless Morass suffers 16 light damage]
[Faceless Morass suffers 16 piercing damage]
The monster let out a mournful wail that sounded like it was gargling pebbles. It arched in agony as Martin dragged his sword out of its back with a shriek of steel on stone, like some cock-eyed Arthurian legend. The once and future rat king.
Good old Celestial Strike wasn’t as useless as it had first appeared; the light damage let him bypass armor and physical resistance. He might not get the full whack of damage each time, but the deeper they went into Strata and the more resilient monsters became, the more useful just being able to get basic weapon damage through an enemy’s defenses was going to get.
With the welcome distraction of Martin’s backstab, the other two went to work on the front side of the Morass. From the lack of spells being flung around, Martin had guessed that the Sythvan wasn’t an invoker. The steady pulses o
f light she was pouring into Jericho confirmed his suspicions.
Serene was an expression Martin had never thought would be applicable to a wolf’s face, but Jericho looked completely at peace as the golden glow around him coiled and lashed out according to his will.
[Faceless Morass suffers 4 light damage]
[CRITICAL HIT]
[Faceless Morass suffers 12 light damage]
[Faceless Morass suffers 5 light damage]
Each impact knocked another hunk of the seething Morass loose. Every blow kept it off balance, unable to fight back. Lindsay was still on top of it, lost amongst the flashing light and chaos, but still moving with purpose despite all the distractions.
She dug her daggers into the Morass’ neck, slicing up, dragging the sharp edges through whatever connective tissues and dirt were hidden beneath the surface. With a heave, she made the “Faceless” part of the monster’s name even more true.
[Faceless Morass suffers 18 slashing damage]
Faceless Morass has died.
Skaife gains 420 experience.
Pieces began to tumble off the Morass, spattering in the water around it in a shower. Fragments of stone. Clumps of sod. Withering coils of roots and vine. It all rained down on them as the monster died.
Lindsay leapt down from its shoulders, crowing out their victory.
“Iron Riot!”
“Iron Riot!” echoed back without a thought from Martin, Jericho and the Sythvan.
It only took him an instant to recognize their voices. Jericho had been their main tank when they were raiding in Dracolich. It was handy that he had kept the same name so that they didn’t have to learn a new one, since Jericho was more than a little reluctant to share details about his real life with his gaming buddies.