by G. D. Penman
Martin now finally had time to look at the Sythvan for more than a moment, so he did just that until the tooltip popped up showing her character’s name as Adriel, the usual alias of Julia.
Julia had been one of their best healers, with a great sense of timing and the kind of upbeat attitude that could carry the whole guild through a night of failure with a smile. On the downside, she was more than a little flaky, often missing crucial raids with vague excuses about work, family or forgetting.
If he’d been given the option to hand-pick the best of the best to carry over with them to their new game, those two would have been at the top of the list. Well, in the top ten, certainly.
He strode over to the towering Wulvan and tried to slap him on the back in greeting, but he could barely reach above Jericho’s ass, so he aborted that plan at the last moment.
“I am so glad to see you two,” he said.
Julia wrapped him in a hug from behind, scales scraping over his fur and making it stand on end. “Was being alone with Lindsay driving you crazy?”
“Are you kidding? He’s already blown himself up to prove how much he loves me!” Lindsay guffawed. “Thank god you guys are here to save me from this creepy little stalker!”
She glanced around conspiratorially then added in a stage whisper, “He keeps trying to make me call him snack-size.”
Martin threw his sword at her, and she ducked away cackling.
Jericho’s voice was always deep, but with the addition of his new Wulvan features, it had the unmistakable bass tones of a growl. “It is good to see that no matter which game we play, some things never change. The two of you are still idiots.”
As he waded around looking for his sword, Martin asked, “So how did you guys get to Deep Two so quickly?”
When he glanced back, the two newcomers were looking at each other guiltily while Lindsay pretended to be extremely interested in her own feet in the water. Martin sighed.
“How long have you two been playing Strata?”
Julia had the good grace to look embarrassed about it. “Probably around about a week, on and off?”
Martin stubbed his toe on the hilt of his sword. “Because Lindsay had already told you both that we were moving here. A week ago. Before she even spoke to me.”
Jericho nodded. “Guilds here can only have ten members to limit sharing of the Deep Gate keys. Lindsay picked only the best to come with us. Very hush-hush.”
That explained the lack of an official announcement. Like the one he’d just posted in Dracolich. Whoops. Martin turned to Lindsay, who was still staring at her feet.
“So, what happened? Did someone else turn you down? Is that why you came to me a week after everyone else had already started?”
She sloshed the water back and forth.
“You’re a bit… I mean… you can be a little… resistant to change.”
“She said it would be better to surprise you with it,” Julia blurted out.
Martin closed his eyes, took a deep breath and crouched to retrieve his sword from the silty water. By the time he stood up again, he had bitten back all the bitter replies and his smile was fixed back in place. “She was probably right.”
Moments ago, they had been locked in a life-and-death struggle with an overly aggressive shrub, their virtual lives hanging in the balance and their purpose in danger of being subverted, yet it wasn’t until now that the tension finally left the echoing chamber.
Julia practically melted on the spot. Lindsay’s beaky grin seemed a little less fragile than it had a moment ago. Even Jericho’s massive shoulders seemed to slump in relief.
“It is good that we are all here together. You are idiots, yes, but… not the worst I have played with,” he rumbled.
Lindsay punched Jericho, ineffectually, in the arm. “Love you too, meat-face.”
Julia had both sets of eyelids closed over eyes just as golden as her scales, her concentration directed inward to the menu screens. “So, same time again tomorrow?”
That was enough to crack Martin’s mask of civility.
“What? I just got here. We’ve got so much to catch up on.”
Lindsay was trying to subtly massage some life back into her hand. “Dude, tomorrow is Friday, we’ve got the whole weekend to catch up. Go get some sleep. You’ll be trashed for tomorrow if you don’t.”
He wasn’t going to beg. He couldn’t, not when his ego was already fragile after Lindsay’s little deception.
“Don’t you want to explore just a little bit further? Find somewhere secure to log back into? I only just got here. I’d like to get the lay of the land before we—”
“Sleep time now.” Jericho patted him on the head. “See you tomorrow.”
A pillar of light enveloped the wolf, and he blinked out of sight. Julia shrugged apologetically.
“I’ve got a morning meeting. Sorry, Martin.”
With a flash, she was gone too, leaving Martin alone with Lindsay again. She eyed him warily.
“You’re still going to yell at me, aren’t you?”
“You didn’t want to give me the chance to say no or to delay you until I could afford the game. I get it.” He sighed. “I probably would have argued with you if you’d come to me earlier instead of waiting until I was feeling… vulnerable after Dracolich ended. I should probably be impressed that you out-maneuvered me, right?”
“Dude, I didn’t want to trick you, I just… I really wanted you to come along.”
Martin stared off over her shoulder at the tunnels arrayed around them. “Because I’m your winning edge?”
“Because we’re friends. You ass.”
He couldn’t help but laugh, despite the sting of betrayal. “Yeah, I guess we are.”
“Which makes me paying you feel a bit weird. Maybe I should keep the loot from the Ravager? Since we’re friends?”
“Anything useful?”
“Just some silver. It was like there was other loot there but I couldn’t touch it? Like a glitch or something.”
“A glitch, or one of the moderators deliberately screwing us over.”
She seemed to catch that negativity and take it as a personal challenge to be more bubbly. “So, you’ll be here tomorrow? Right?” Same time as usual?”
She wasn’t just looking at him, she was studying him. Maybe they were spending too much time together.
“Yes Lindsay, I’ll be here, same time tomorrow.”
She sidled a little bit closer.
“You know I’m going to message you about a million times tomorrow to make sure you don’t change your mind?”
“That is a pretty much guaranteed way to make me change my mind.” Martin snorted.
She danced back, eyes sparkling with amusement. “Too late. Can’t take it back now. It’d be a pinkie promise if we both had pinkies.”
“See you tomorrow, Lindsay.”
She blew him a kiss. “Catch you later, Snack-size.”
He threw his sword at her again, but before it made contact, she vanished into a pillar of light. Her cackling persisted until the light blinked out and Martin was left alone in the dark once more.
With his weapon retrieved, Martin was trapped in a moment of indecision. The others had been right. Sleep was definitely the smarter option at this point in time.
Of course, knowing that did nothing to make the temptation of the tunnels disgorging their steady streams of water into the chamber any less intense.
The monster crumbled apart a little more at his feet, revealing something glinting inside.
Martin was no fool. He knew all that glittered wasn’t gold, and that something shiny to attract your attention in this game was probably more likely to be an anglerfish’s lure than treasure, but he also knew that nobody had looted the Morass after they fought it, and most enemies so far had dropped something at least.
He crept carefully towards the already moldering heap. The looting window appeared in front of him the moment his toe nudged a lump beneath the wat
er.
Faceless Morass
These lumbering giants lurk in jungle rivers and overgrown sewers, accumulating biomass from the moving water until they have become large enough to serve as formidable guardians and their sentience ignites.
Loot: 14 silver, Whetstone Bracers, Rain Tear Crystal.
Requires Herbalism to harvest: Unknown Plant, Unknown Plant, Unknown Plant, Unknown Plant, Fertile Substrate.
He really was going to have to pick up a trade skill soon; there was a whole world of items that he couldn’t even comprehend yet. He dumped everything into his empty backpack just to be on the safe side. No way of knowing which plants would actually be useful until he found an herbalist, and it wasn’t like he had a lot to carry at the moment.
The new wrist-guards were interesting at least. He equipped them and then closed his eyes to read the tooltip.
Whetstone Bracers (16 Armor)
Once the property of a master swordsman, these stone-bound greaves do little to protect the wearer, but instead provide them with ample opportunity to sharpen their weapons. After all, the best defense is a good offense.
He tried them out, dragging his sword over the silvery stone and enduring the awful scraping until the Sharpened property attached itself to his old Copper Shortsword, granting it a 3% increased critical chance for an hour.
That wasn’t too shabby, and the bracers didn’t seem to have any limitation on how many times they could be used in a day. He couldn’t believe they had forgotten to loot the body and nearly missed these. What an amateur-hour mistake. They really must be overtired.
Five more minutes. Just five more minutes to check if the rest of this deep was going to be as nerve-racking as the entrance area.
Then he would definitely log out, get a reasonable amount of sleep and pass himself off as a functioning member of society tomorrow without any more incidents with Gillian.
Five minutes. Easy.
Fourteen
Hero of the Quagmire
Applying real world logic to Deep Two did not seem to help with navigation. All of the tunnel water seemed to be slowly pooling in spherical chambers like the first one, yet there wasn’t a single dry tunnel anywhere to be found, regardless of their elevation.
The persistent fog might have explained it if the water was being restored through condensation, but that would have required some part of the tunnel system to be warmer, and so far there was no indication that there was anything but clammy mist everywhere that Martin went.
In some places, the mud was splattered in a thinner smear across the walls and the graven patterns stood out more clearly. There was something about them that felt intimately familiar to Martin. He was certain they didn’t match any ancient hieroglyphics or language he’d ever read about, but nonetheless he felt like he knew them, like their meaning was just out of reach.
Maybe the Masters had reused some old assets from another game that Martin had played, or maybe he was just going insane from sleep deprivation. Also a distinct possibility.
Sphere after sphere opened up in front of Martin as he roamed through the deep, slowly but surely filling out his map. In some of the chambers the water rose almost to the level of the tunnels that fed them and he didn’t dare to go swimming out for all of the imagined crocodiles beneath the surface.
In some of the others, he found more Faceless Morass, standing completely immobile in a way that had to be a deliberate attempt at camouflage. These chambers he backed away from quietly until he reached another crossroads.
A pattern soon emerged: each spherical chamber was evenly spaced from the last, arrayed in a grid that stretched out in every direction except where he’d come from. Martin remained certain that there had to be a hot part of the dungeon to explain the water cycle, and the complete absence of any change in the spheres did nothing to convince him otherwise.
The Masters might have been assholes, but they were smart assholes. They’d applied logic and physics to every other part of the world they’d made; why would this be different?
He diligently moved on, slowly filling in his mental map, counting as he went. There seemed to be a near infinite number of these chambers. He felt like he had been creeping through them for hours. That was when he noticed the footprints.
Cutting through the edge of the mud by the waterside in this latest sphere, he could see the three-toed tracks of a clawed creature. With a cold weight settling in his stomach, he put his own foot down inside the print. It was a perfect fit.
There was no way he’d gotten backtracked or turned around. He had been going in a straight run through this line of chambers for a dozen of them already. He hadn’t made any turns. He hadn’t made any mistakes.
Time seemed to slow and the trickle of water fell silent. As he watched, the room he was in spun with the soft sound of grinding stone, realigning itself to the next exit around. If he walked straight on, he was now making a right-angle turn.
There were no signs of a mechanical reason for these balls to spin. There was no logic to it. By all appearances, these chambers were literally set in stone.
“What the hell?” he groaned.
A voice came from behind him, soft as a whisper.
“I can’t believe it took you so long to notice.”
Martin jumped away from the voice on pure instinct, spinning and drawing his sword in one fluid motion. The blade lashed out through the gray hooded figure behind him but left no mark. It swung through the space the Master occupied as if there was nothing there at all.
“You again?” Martin growled. “What am I supposed to have done this time?”
The Master held up their empty sleeves in false supplication.
“Nothing at all, dear crusader. We conduct regular maintenance and adjustment of the dungeon to ensure everything runs smoothly. It was just an unfortunate accident that you happened to be caught up in the middle of some reconstruction.”
“An accident. Right. Of course. Silly me, thinking this was harassment.”
The Master drifted closer to him. Martin was certain it was the same one as before. Their appearance was nondescript, but the attitude was identical.
“Harassment is a very strong word. You would seem quite mad if you were to use it. This is merely maintenance. And you are merely in the wrong place at the wrong time, yet again. I have no control over your actions, any more than I have control over your luck.”
“My luck? You’re the reason no decent equipment is dropping?”
“It is a minor thing to tweak certain probabilities. As we discussed before, there are certain rules that cannot be broken. The laws that keep this whole world ticking over correctly.” The Master spun the room again, flinging Martin around like a ball in a roulette wheel. “If I break those rules, then I am no better than the likes of you. The whole construct of reality will fall apart and this world of ours, this Strata, it will fall to chaos.”
Spitting out the swampy water, Martin scrambled back to his feet.
“You’ve spun me around and wasted my time. You’ve stolen a level from me. What more do you want?”
“What could any Master want? I want you to succeed despite the challenges laid at your feet.” Sarcasm was oozing from every word. “The name of Iron Riot is well remembered by the Masters. Many of us have crossed your path before in other worlds. We recall your great victories.”
The Master darted forward, and Martin stumbled to land on his backside in the puddle yet again.
“Do not think that Strata will be such a simple task. We will not see our lives’ work slaughtered on the altar of your petty ambition. Strata will defeat you. It will crush you. You will fall to this dungeon as surely as the rising of the sun.”
With that last word of encouragement, the Master vanished. The air seemed to thin; the water began to trickle once more. Martin should have been furious – he should have been gnashing his teeth and screaming about how unfair it all was – but instead he was filled with a building satisfaction.
> The Masters knew him, and they were running so scared that they were trying to toss extra hurdles in his path. They thought he could beat their game, based on his reputation alone, and he had always been underestimated.
His lips split into a grin. Every time they tried to set him back, they just told him more about the game and how to beat it. There were unbreakable rules, rules that would destroy their game if they were tampered with – and that was why this Master didn’t simply kill him or de-level him over and over.
The Masters were as powerless as a player inside the net of rules they had forged for this game. That was probably why they had to ask for information instead of having a log, too. They’d made a game so complex that not even they could get around it.
Martin picked himself up and then backtracked – with constant references to his map – to the only place he was certain couldn’t be interfered with so easily. The entrance to the deep had been one long, winding tunnel, and only luck – and his recollection that Lindsay always turned right when confronted with two options – had brought him in this direction at all.
Lindsay. He was trying not to think too hard about Lindsay at the moment. He knew he liked to have a routine, but knowing he’d become predictable was another thing entirely.
Lindsay was his friend – inasmuch as anyone using him to serve their own purposes could be a friend – so the idea that she understood him well enough to manipulate him shouldn’t have been this troubling.
He emerged back into the first sphere, carefully peering around the edge of the tunnel to make sure that the Morass hadn’t respawned.
From what he’d been able to gather so far, respawning didn’t seem to be a feature of any of the monsters. If the ecosystem of the dungeon actually shifted with the players’ actions, then presumably the Morass would eventually be replaced by something else. The chamber was as abandoned as when he’d last seen it.