Dungeons of Strata (Deepest Dungeon #1) - A LitRPG series

by G. D. Penman

  Jericho and Julia watched him with pity, while Speckles was gawking at him in open admiration.

  “You save again! You fight bad! You fight bad real good!”

  He tried to smile, but it just wouldn’t come. “All right, folks, just hang on here for a minute. I’ll log out, talk to Lindsay and find out her respawn schedule.”

  Julia gave him a tight-lipped smile, and Jericho looked like he was about to say something when Martin blinked to the menu screen and abruptly logged out.

  The visual effect of falling upwards into the light was slightly ruined by his apartment being pitch black when he emerged back into the real world. If he were more sensible and less practical, he probably would have switched the lights on before he lay down to play, but the sad truth of the matter was, his apartment was too small and too devoid of furniture to provide any sort of obstacle course when he roamed around it in the dark.

  It was only when he tried to move that he realized just how sore he was. He had to rub at his legs before the beginnings of a cramp started to fade away. That made no sense. He was lying perfectly still and relaxed; why would his muscles be tense?

  The NIH clearly paralyzed motor function when you were in the game, otherwise he would have been roaming around all over the place, smacking into walls and, most likely, unplugging the headset from the computer. The only explanation was that the NIH was doing something while he was playing. Working the muscles of his resting body so that they didn’t atrophy, perhaps?

  Another clue, another hint that the NIH had in fact started life as a medical device, just as Martin had suspected. No game developer gave a damn about the physical fitness of their players; if anything, it was in a game company’s best interests to keep players unfit so that they wouldn’t get distracted by sports, dating or the outside world.

  Martin leapt off that train of thought before it stopped at Depression Central and went back to the task at hand. He snatched up his phone, which was down to 3% charge, and sent a message to Lindsay.

  Not the practical message that the rest of the guild might have expected of him.

  Hey, are you all right?

  Drowning had been horrific. Even without pain, people weren’t meant to survive having those sensations. They weren’t meant to get lost in a memory and start gasping for air.

  He couldn’t even imagine what it had felt like to be split in two. He would never ask her for details, even though he was incredibly curious. He didn’t want to make her relive it.

  The experience had clearly shaken Lindsay. All of her usual energy was missing when she messaged him back.

  30 minutes until rebirth. Taking a snack break.

  So, the respawn timers were likely tied to the number of times you had died, not how far you were into the dungeon. That was good to know, and it also meant that Martin would be a little more reluctant about spending their lives for a short-term victory.

  Every death would increase the delay, and if it went on doubling then he could end up locked out of the game for a day or more, plus however long it took them to get back down through the deeps. Even if they didn’t have to fight for the Deep Key each time, there were still enemies about. They were only three deeps in; they had to start being more careful.

  He sent a message back.

  Sorry that happened. Small consolation: we avenged you. Hard.

  After that, he waited for a long minute, hoping for a laugh or a vengeful cat picture, but nothing was forthcoming. The NIH had never come off his head throughout the whole exercise, and now all it took was a few keystrokes before he was sinking back into the blissful trance of Strata.

  The others startled at his arrival, even though the pillar of light was a pretty clear announcement that somebody was logging in. Martin opened his mouth to speak and was immediately interrupted by the thump of Speckles tackling him around the waist and knocking both of them over.

  “You come back!”

  He clambered back to his feet with a groan, shoving the little frog-man off him. “She’ll be back in half an hour. Call it another half hour to get through the first two deeps. I suggest we wait here for her.”

  The other two looked pretty imposing, looming at the far end of the step. Martin could understand why Speckles was getting nervous if this was the treatment he’d been receiving while Martin was away. Jericho just shook his head, but Julia was a little more talkative.

  “I think she would probably want us to press on… I mean… we want to keep on going.”

  Martin didn’t budge. “You saw what happens when we rush ahead.”

  “We will move together. We will work together. As we always do. That is not in question,” Jericho rumbled. “But we are losing time. Other guilds, they are already fighting Archdukes. It does not matter if Lindsay is with the guild, all that matters is pressing on.”

  Julia chimed in again. “If we clear the way for her, she can join us much faster, just like you said about the upper levels.”

  “I don’t want to just abandon her.”

  She had been through too much already. Martin was half tempted to head back up to Beachhead and meet her on arrival, so that she wouldn’t have to spend any more time alone.

  He still wasn’t certain how the instancing in the game worked, although everyone seemed to be seeing the same thing. Maybe for other people the swamp above was still intact? But for Iron Riot, the swamp above would be drained, and there was no telling what fresh horrors had been hidden beneath its surface.

  “Why are you pretending that you care? Because you want a balanced party?” Jericho scoffed. “Because you want to minimize risk? This is a race. Every time we wait, the other guilds get further ahead of us. Slow is the risk.”

  [ANNOUNCEMENT: OOC Crew have defeated Carnifex, Tenth Archduke of Strata]

  Martin bit back his eviscerating reply. This was the face that he’d presented to them, the cold clinical side of his personality. He couldn’t turn around and be angry that they expected him to behave like a robot now.

  Logic was unassailable, and he’d wielded it like a weapon throughout the years to prevent any emotional argument from holding sway in the guild. It wasn’t surprising that they ascribed him purely tactical motives when he had refused to let any of them see him as anything more or less than a calculating machine.

  He forced his jaw to relax.

  “We owe it to her to wait. She deserves at least that much.”

  Sweet, quiet Julia was watching him with a weirdly assessing stare. Like she could see right into his head.

  “We don’t owe her anything. We like her. She’s our friend. But that doesn’t mean everything grinds to a halt when she isn’t around. Think about it. What do you think you owe her, exactly?”

  Everything. He owed her everything. She’d brought him into the guild, the closest thing that he’d ever found to a friendship with others.

  Then she’d brought him into Strata, which felt more like home than any of the dozen crappy rented apartments he’d lived in since his mother kicked him out of the house. She had given him a family, she had given him friendship, she had given him this whole world that he vastly preferred to the real one where his entire life felt meaningless.

  She’d done all of that for him, and now he couldn’t even tell Jericho and Julia any part of it, because he was too embarrassed. Because the idea of admitting that Lindsay had bought him the game and brought him along like a pet or a servant was too shameful.

  The hours Martin spent playing these games were the only time that he didn’t hate his life and himself, but now that self-loathing was bubbling in his chest.

  It was like he was watching the whole thing from a distance. He heard himself say: “Fine. Let’s go.”

  They did not discuss it again, instead beginning the arduous task of making the jumps down the platforms.

  Every step took them further away from Lindsay. Away from where he knew in his gut he should remain.

  Deeper and deeper into the dark.

 
Twenty

  The Waters of Strata

  Speckles turned out to be the most competent of them all. He had a frog’s natural propensity for jumping and only his absolute terror at his surroundings prevented him from bouncing down the whole waterfall-ladder ahead of the group and reaching the bottom within minutes.

  Jericho still took the longest, taking a while to wind up and to land on each great platform, but he at least had the decency to jump first in case another ambush predator was lurking behind the waterfall.

  It would have been almost too easy for Martin to dwell on his inability to speak out, but he forced himself to keep his eyes on the figurative prize, and to do all he could to make Lindsay’s descent easier.

  Moving as a group wasn’t guaranteed to keep them safe but it was likely to ward off any potential ambushers. That was why he began to linger at the back of the group, making sure everyone else had jumped first before he followed after.

  It wasn’t that he was using himself as bait – he wasn’t suicidal, even if he was having one of his darker moods. And Lindsay’s death was delay enough; his own would have stretched out to two hours if they kept escalating at the same rate.

  But he had to make sure there were no predators lying in wait for solo travelers.

  He was ready for another attack – primed to leap to safety if there was any sign of movement behind the wall of water – but there was none. Either the crab at the top had been a unique enemy or the rest were sensibly remaining hidden rather than trying to pick off stragglers in a larger group.

  If it was the former, then Martin would be happy, but if it was the latter then Lindsay was going to be easy prey for every one of them, and the guild was setting her up for another gruesome death.

  Just as he didn’t want to dwell on his own cowardice, Martin couldn’t stomach that thought either. It wouldn’t be practical to try and push through the waterfall at every protrusion on the off chance that there was a cave back there. It had been luck as much as favorable placement that had stopped the water pressure from bowling them off these steps before, and even if that risk wasn’t there, he didn’t think the others would let him slow their progress to a crawl just on the chance that he might be able to lead them into another fight they likely couldn’t win.

  When they reached one side of the waterfall, the craggy stone of the wall lay exposed ahead of them. Martin gave serious consideration to trying to climb down the wall itself. At first, he thought it was better than having to deal with the stress of a potential ambush lurking just out of sight. But, if he was honest, there were probably giant murderous beetles, land eels or something equally ridiculous hiding in the gaps between the rocks, just waiting for them to choose that path instead.

  The whole dungeon was a death-trap and their only mistake so far had been underestimating it. So they continued on in their leapfrogging down, wending back the other way. By Martin’s vague estimates, they were almost halfway down before the turnaround, but he could have been wrong.

  It didn’t take long before his vigilance began to slip. There were so many stairs. It was taking so long. He went a couple without even considering the possibility of another ambush. Then, in a turnabout of anxiety, he realized they were likely reaching a prime spot for a second attack.

  He was hyper-aware during the next two jumps, twitching every time the water made so much as an unexpected splash. Then they were down another step, and another, and still the next ambush didn’t come. Still the hammer didn’t fall. It was torturous, waiting for the monster to pop out. Ingeniously designed to drive a player mad.

  After the first attack, he would never be able to shake off the suspicion that every other step could be equally lethal, and that was a trap in itself, designed to heighten the tension of what could otherwise be a boring bit of platforming.

  Low-light vision came to the rescue once again, giving him the first glimpse of the cavern floor beneath them. The waterfall was flowing into a huge circular pool at the center of an extensive cavern.

  But where Martin had been expecting more of the rough rock that had typified the steps and walls on either side, the material surrounding the pool and beyond was polished and smooth. He couldn’t be certain of the color or details at this distance, but he suspected that it was something very like marble.

  Classical columns ringed the water, and further in, he thought he could make out more of them, along with worked stone archways. Like they were finally descending into some sort of civilization, or at least the ruins of one.

  The second surprise came only a few moments later when he tried to jump to the next platform and nearly mistimed his leap, a movement at the periphery of his vision distracting him.

  There was something living and moving around down there. He hit the next step with his shins and tumbled end over end, nearly bowling over Julia and Speckles for his trouble.

  [Skaife suffers 2 bludgeoning environmental damage]

  [Adriel suffers 1 bludgeoning environmental damage]

  [Anurvan Scout suffers 1 bludgeoning environmental damage]

  “Be careful,” Jericho growled, extricating himself from Julia’s armpit.

  But Martin wasn’t paying the blindest bit of attention. He crawled out of the tangle of limbs and stuck his head out over the edge of the platform.

  For a moment Martin thought it was the remnants of the Anurvan population that had somehow survived the quarter-mile fall, before dismissing the idea as a ridiculous fantasy. Even if it were possible, the Anurvan didn’t make fires, and they weren’t half as tall as some of the figures he saw moving around.

  He stared for a long moment, desperately trying to work out what kind of monster they were going to face next, before he realized that they weren’t monsters at all.

  “There are players down there. A few groups of them. It looks like they’ve set up a makeshift camp. I guess there isn’t another town for a while.”

  Jericho nodded. “Good. We can trade for food, or potions or whatever.”

  Martin’s experiences of the other players in Strata so far hadn’t been all trading and camaraderie, but he supposed that if you were a nine-foot-tall wolf-man then you got special treatment. At least compared to how rat-men were treated. Still, he had the protection of the group now, and the other players didn’t have the example of the NPCs treating the Murovan like crap. Maybe things would be better.

  They made the final few jumps without incident, and they were almost down to the floor before Martin froze.

  “Wait. Wait. What about Speckles?”

  Jericho rolled his eyes. “Who is this Speckles?”

  Julia was looking at him curiously again, as if he were an unusual fungus instead of a person, but at least she didn’t say anything.

  Martin grumbled. “He is a frog man, about my height, covered in speckles.”

  “You named your pet,” Jericho rumbled. “How cute.”

  Martin gave up trying to reason with the humans and turned his attention to the far more sensible frog-person.

  “Do you think you can hide? There are other people here. Maybe bad.”

  Speckles didn’t have to be asked twice. He took a quick look around then stepped right under the waterfall, where he vanished instantly in the torrents of water. Simple but effective, assuming a giant crab monster wasn’t hiding behind the waterfall, just waiting for a tasty little froggy snack.

  “Wait here,” Martin said. “We’ll get you before we leave.”

  Silence.

  Once again, Martin put it out of his mind and moved forward. There was no point in worrying about what might be when he had enough problems right in front of him just waiting to be navigated.

  The Armored Brachyura lay close to the waterfall, the spray doing a poor job of washing away the yellow pus that was seeping from its shattered carapace.

  Martin’s hand drifted down to his sword as he approached it. He knew it was dead, he’d read the notification himself, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want to kill it all
over again for what it had done.

  Armored Brachyura

  This monstrous crustacean is a ravenous ambush predator. Brachyura are often employed by more intelligent monsters of the dungeon as guard-dogs.

  Loot: 43 silver, Curse-Scarred Kukri, Blue Blood Crystals.

  Requires Blacksmithing to Harvest: Heavy Chitin Plates.

  The kukri dagger was knave-only, and it would be a good upgrade for Lindsay when she got back – small recompense for the trauma she’d endured, but something at least. When he looked at it on his inventory screen an option appeared to transfer it to another player’s inventory directly. That was a handy way to keep everyone in the best gear if they had to split up. He sent the kukri to Lindsay.

  The Crystals were strange, presumably something to do with the crafting systems that Martin still hadn’t had the chance to touch. None of this was worth the price they’d had to pay for it. Martin gave the crab one last kick for good measure, then wandered back to the group.

  The camp was a fair distance away from the waterfall, likely so as to avoid falling players, rocks, or giant crabs. Probably sensible.

  Upon arrival, Martin saw it was an all-Sythvan party, which wouldn’t have even occurred to him to try. A guild named Snakes In Your Boots.

  He supposed Strata had been online for long enough now that people could have restarted the whole process with new characters designed to suit the challenges ahead. Presumably a lot more water, if the Sythvan were the race of choice.

  He might have been tempted himself if he thought that he’d taken a misstep when building his character. As it was, he still wasn’t convinced that exorcist wasn’t the best pick overall, despite it being a poor fit for the usual three-pronged party structure of tank, damage and healer.

  More importantly, he wasn’t convinced that he’d committed so far in any one direction in his build yet that he couldn’t recover. Besides, nobody was past the 50th deep yet. No matter how much water this group knew they were going to find in the next few levels, it would almost inevitably be balanced out by dry areas in the deeps they hadn’t reached yet.