by G. D. Penman
Lindsay butted in again. “Martin wouldn’t have even come to us with it if he didn’t think it was the best plan. You know Martin.”
Martin had the good grace to look embarrassed about how transparent he was. “Three votes was all we needed. Let’s go waste my biggest cooldown.”
All their eyes were on him, and for some reason that was embarrassing now. In battle, their eyes turned his way constantly; it seemed strange that in these quiet moments he should get so awkward.
He held out a hand to the pool, the ring of silver barely visible beneath the crumbled stone. This was it. With one last press of effort, he cast Rite of Passage.
For one long awful moment, nothing happened. Then sparks started to dance around the edges of the pool. Arcs of purple lightning snapped back and forth, dancing around, coruscating across the surface of the water.
With a sudden thump that Martin felt in the pit of his stomach, the Gate opened; a glowing spiral of that same purple light, barely bound within the confines of the ring.
He couldn’t see anything on the other side. Just that blinding light. They had no way of knowing what they would be jumping into. No way to plan for what was to come.
Lindsay cannonballed in. The lightning rippled for a moment, then returned to its entropic state. Jericho took Julia’s hand and jumped too, before there was time for doubt.
Martin looked up into the stunned faces of the players around him with a fair amount of surprise showing on his own rodent features. Then, with a laugh, he dove in too.
He regretted everything. Beyond the eye of purple light, there was nothing but absolute darkness. Just the briefest glimpse of the hollow robes of a Master, hanging below the portal, an arm raised up in a mocking wave, then nothing at all.
He could feel himself falling, but after that first moment he couldn’t see a thing. Tumbling end over end, he wondered if he should just log out. Get out of the game rather than suffer through whatever fresh hell he’d just delivered them all into.
Maybe the spiteful Master had come by with one final trick. He supposed it would be easy to whack a magical portal out of alignment. A couple of lines of code tweaked a little and instead of landing at the intended location he could be dumped outside of the game world in this awful primordial darkness.
Dread settled over him like a funereal shroud. This wouldn’t kill him. He would never respawn. He would just fall forever and ever. It had all been for nothing. He would have to start over, with none of the advantages and tricks that they’d had the first time around. Lindsay would have to leave him behind, if she hadn’t been dragged into the same void.
Tears of frustration pricked at the corners of his eyes. Why were people like this? Every time people got involved, everything good seemed to fall apart. His job. This game. If everyone would just leave him alone, he could be happy. Why did everyone want a piece of him?
For another long moment he fell. Trying to keep his fury under control. Trying to think of a solution. Then he caught a glimpse of something down below. A speck of green light. All his dread and anger flushed away in terror.
“Yes. Come to me.”
“No. No. No.”
He startled at the sound of his own voice.
“Come to me. Serve me. Come down into the dark.”
Martin twisted with all of his strength, and just barely managed to break eye-contact with the green light. Pressing his own eyes shut. Trying to will this nightmare away.
He hit the ground and the numbness that Strata gave instead of honest pain spread across his back like ice-water. He opened his eyes and gasped up at the looming animal faces of Lindsay, Jericho and Julia, illuminated in the light of a ragged looking torch they’d fashioned from a well-chewed femur.
“What took you so long?” Lindsay asked.
A shaky laugh rattled life back into his body.
“Took a wrong turn.”
Lindsay’s cackle dumped warmth right back into his chest.
“And here we thought you’d just wimped out on us. Come on, dude. You’ve got to see this place.”
Twenty-Five
The Executioner of Strata
They were at the foot of a great basalt cliff, with the crackling purple portal only just visible within a great crack. The shadows lay thick and heavy over the bottom of the chasm, and the others kept tripping over one another as they crept along.
They were all being buoyed along by their own bravado, by their inflated sense of their own power and skill in the face of Strata. Martin was just as bad as any of the rest of them, still certain, despite all his suspicions, that somehow they would overcome the odds. That he could best the first Archduke of Strata with trickery and cunning the way they had beaten the impossible bosses before.
It was easier to focus on that than to consider any of the other things that had been happening down in this dungeon; the Master out to get him, the inexplicable qualities of the game, and – most pressingly – the voice in his head, echoing up from some unfathomably dark place beneath their feet.
Normally, he would backtrack through the lessons he had learned from the lesser bosses in the levels before; but in that regard, as with their character progression, they were lagging massively behind the curve.
Martin had no clue what they were about to walk in on, whether it would be some big angry plant or a crab-man or anything else. All he had to work with were the whispers of that voice that should not have been in his head and the scraps and tatters he had managed to piece together.
Carnifex, First Archduke of Strata, had been defeated by other guilds while they were playing, so it was possible to defeat him. All they needed was to find some way around their statistical disadvantages.
In a normal game, Martin would have just dragged everyone back up to grind through some levels, but the race lay forever at the back of his mind, ticking away like a clock. They couldn’t afford to waste the time. Not if there was a chance they could push right through this fight the way they had so many before.
The chasm gradually widened as they went along, the bare black stone fading out of sight as they walked ever forward into the echoing dark chamber up ahead.
Beneath their feet gravel gave way to flagstones, then to graven flagstones marked with the same complex symbols that Martin had been trying to decipher through the mud way back in the second deep. All clear as day here, each detail picked out in sharp relief as though blackened with soot.
Martin stared for a long moment, then sniffed at the air. There was something wrong. They had been strolling through the dark for long enough for tension to build and abate.
The boss should have sprung out on them by now. There was some trap here that he just hadn’t been able to put together yet. He sniffed again, and caught what he was searching for: a faint acrid aroma just a little like the breath of the Night Ravager.
“Oh no. Kill the torch. Kill the—”
There was a sudden rush of that same foul air from up ahead and the torch suddenly exploded into a fireball.
[Tesra suffers 6 fire damage]
[Adriel suffers 7 fire damage]
[Jericho suffers 6 fire damage]
Martin had taken a few precautionary steps away, but even still he could smell his fur sizzling off, flooding the room with its burnt-popcorn stench. The soot made sense at least. Where the flames had touched the flagstones, those strange familiar runes now took on an even more familiar glow.
An emerald-green light flickered up from beneath them, spreading out from where the flames had burst over the ground and rippling out until the whole chamber was up-lit.
It took him far too long to recognize what he was looking at and he reacted far too slowly to the movement up above them in the endless darkness. Martin was barely able to fling himself aside before the massive cleaver of bone hammered down onto the spot where he had stood and sent up flares of green light.
[MISS]
That flash was enough to furnish his overactive imagination with just enough de
tails to go wild. The cleaver was not a weapon held in some creature’s hand. Tendons clung to it further up. Patches of wiry black hair grew from the meatier parts.
It was the Archduke’s arm. One great jagged length of bone, five times the length of Martin’s whole body. A weapon from shoulder to tip.
Beyond the cleaver arm, up in the shadows beyond the immediate murderous swipe there was only the faintest sheen of bare wet bone reflecting back down. Just the hint of a horse-like skull exposed amidst more of that same bristling hair.
Carnifex, First Archduke of Strata, Executioner of the Heart
It was huge. The size of a building. Too big to be moving so quickly into another attack.
The next swing was far less precise, a ragged hacking thing that swept across the whole room and sent the whole guild diving onto the ground to avoid being ripped in half.
[MISS]
There was no way that any one of them except Jericho could survive a single blow from a weapon like that, no matter how far game mechanics might differ from reality. For as long as Carnifex was alive, they were all just one mistake away from death.
The tip of the blade scraped along the far wall, marking the edge of their battlefield, leaving a jagged tear through the runic tiles and unleashing another sudden burst of that same sickly green light from each damaged symbol.
Martin dragged his eyes away from the horror-show of the patchwork beast and bellowed to be heard over the sound of the scraping bone.
“This is going to be a DPS race. We need to burst him down before he lands a hit. Don’t just stare. Buff and move!”
He took his own advice, igniting his Celestial Strike and charging, wishing all the while that it didn’t give off light marking his position and exposing him to more brief glimpses of the lumbering thing up ahead.
The body of Carnifex seemed centaur-like, with four legs and a torso jutting from its forequarters. That was good. He could work with that. A body like that came with a lot of blind spots. If he could get under the belly, he’d get a few free swings, and if he could get on its back he might be able to focus on churning out damage as fast as he could.
His sword burned like a rising star amidst the murk of the cavernous chamber. It was hardly surprising that he was the one Carnifex chose to attack again. He could feel the disturbance in the air before he saw the great ridge of bone coming for him out of the darkness.
There would be no ducking this swing. It came in at waist height and he had to fling himself up into the air and cast Rebuke just to deflect it low enough to have the pleasure of tumbling head over heels across the flat of the blade.
[MISS]
Every miss was another win for Iron Riot. But it had to miss every time, and they only had to make a mistake once before it was all over.
Martin didn’t hesitate when he felt stone beneath his back once more; he just uncurled and half-ran, half-scrambled the rest of the distance to the great grotesque hoof that was closest to him.
[Carnifex suffers 16 slashing damage]
[Carnifex suffers 16 light damage]
Any hope of light doing extra damage was sunk, as was any hope that this monstrosity relied on armor to soak up damage. It must have had a health pool big enough to drown dragons in.
Martin nearly fell as a sudden impact hit him in the middle of his back, then again on his shoulder an instant later.
But to his relief, there was no blood or numbness. Lindsay had used him like a springboard for her Raptor Strike.
[Carnifex suffers 36 piercing damage]
“Nice,” he called out.
Lindsay laughed as she kicked off the thick trunk of a leg to land back on her feet. “Glad you approve. I’ll go on using you as a step-ladder in the future.”
[Jericho BLOCKS 76 damage]
The impact rang out through the chamber, a concussive wave that rocked them where they stood. Jericho was trying to go toe to toe with the titan. He was trying to treat this like a fair fight that they could win by playing their roles.
Martin had no time for nicety, not now. “Get your ass out of there, you idiot.”
“Julia tripped over new robes,” Jericho grunted back.
Julia spoke at almost the same time. “My fault. My fault.”
Lindsay rolled her eyes. “Just get Jericho back up and keep moving.”
Martin had closed the distance with Lindsay and was holding his bracers up for her use. She swept her odd daggers over them with a shriek.
“All damage is good damage. Now get in the fight!”
There were flares of light in the distance, bright enough to illuminate Jericho and Julia for brief moments before darkness swept them away again. Martin could see her laying her hands on him, and Jericho jerking her aside as another massive sweep of the cleaver came too close.
[MISS]
Together, they were better than either one of them could have been alone. Together, they were more. Then the steady percussion of Jericho’s flurry attack began, ticking off point after point of damage in brief bursts before he had to dive out of the way of yet another attack.
[Carnifex suffers 5 light damage]
[Carnifex suffers 6 light damage]
[Carnifex suffers 5 light damage]
[Carnifex suffers 4 light damage]
The hoof that they had been attacking lifted off the ground and sent Martin and Lindsay scampering away before it came hammering down.
They charged back in as one and he called on Smite as his sword swung for the gleam of exposed bone amongst the thicket of fur and the stench of rot.
[Carnifex suffers 31 slashing damage]
[Carnifex suffers 10 light damage]
Martin was taken aback by how much damage he had actually done until he remembered that his attacks were finally benefitting from his strength. Smite was his new favorite thing. Lindsay’s blades took on a purple flicker as she darted in and stabbed them both solidly into the meat beside Martin.
[Carnifex suffers 28 piercing damage]
She let out a cackle of delight that turned into a yelp as the leg lifted off with her still attached.
Martin was under no illusion about how much damage they were really dealing to this thing as a percentage. A hundred damage and change might have been enough to polish off a Night Ravager, but this was one of the game’s raid bosses. If it didn’t keep moving the same hoof, he would have said it probably wasn’t even feeling their attacks.
They needed more. He ran for the back leg on the same side. If they could topple the thing then Lindsay could get at its head. An exposed skull probably meant a lot of those organs that people liked to keep on the inside could very well be on the outside too, and they needed some advantage if they were ever going to get this over with.
By the time he reached the back leg it was already sweeping towards him, but he didn’t slow, just adjusted his aim, diving to one side and slashing at an exposed tendon. Celestial Strike came off cooldown and flared to life just before he made contact.
[Carnifex suffers 16 slashing damage]
[Carnifex suffers 16 light damage]
It was another drop in the bucket, but it meant that his Trinity Strike would be up next, and he could blow his other cooldowns to get their critical hit chances up enough to make it all worthwhile.
If this was going to be a meatgrinder, he was going to make it into the most efficient meatgrinder that any of them had ever been in.
Jericho was still diligently pounding away with the flurrying lights of his aura, ticking off damage points like the seconds off the clock. Julia must have been by his side, topping off his health and empowering him however hierophants did. They seemed to have worked out the synergy of their roles, and Martin trusted them enough to let them get on with it.
Martin slapped a hand to the guild-crest. “Save your big hits. I’m blowing a cooldown in ten seconds that should put your crit chance through the roof.”
Lindsay’s voice didn’t come back through the same connection. It echoed in a
shriek from somewhere up above them.
“I’m on a really wrinkly knee! It’s like one of those bald cats. But corpsier!”
Martin couldn’t help but laugh. “Keep climbing!”
That was when everything went to hell. The underside of Carnifex’s long body split open, like two great doors of putrid skin flapping apart. A downpour of rancid liquid, tainted green by the rune-light, came gushing out a moment later to splash across the floor.
Martin was so taken aback that he just gawked up into the shadowed opening as the reek of the Archduke’s innards washed over him.
Eggs began to rain down, each as big as his fist. Each leathery and spiked with bone fragments that made no sense to any egg-laying mammal, but awful sense to a creature that could drop them like bombs from its guts.
One egg hit Martin in the shoulder before he came to his senses, but instead of bouncing right off, it latched there. The jagged bone hooked cruelly into his flesh.
[Skaife suffers 6 piercing damage]
[Skaife is poisoned]
This was the first hint at poison in the game – probably another of the many things that they had skipped past. Martin reached up to yank the egg free, then froze with a horrible realization.
The spines of bone on the egg’s surface were rippling, adjusting their position as his fingers approached, ready to hook into them too, to pin his hand uselessly in place.
There was no blessed cold as the poison spread through his blood; only an ever-growing heat, and a horrific sensation of something scuttling around under his skin.
He fumbled his sword from the numb fingers of the hand on his injured side into the other and struck the egg. It popped like a cyst, spraying more of that rancid fluid everywhere. It blinded one eye with an acidic sizzle, the sound turning Martin’s stomach.