He made sure to walk away from the guards before he asked, “So, where’s the treasure?”
“What treasure?” the dwarf asked. “Hic,” he added.
“The reward,” he said. “You promised me a reward if I got you out, and it seems to me that I did that. So where is it?”
“Oh.” Lyle looked around and hiccupped again. He seemed to appreciate the night air and the sounds of the owls. Contemplatively, he said, “I don’t remember.”
“You don’t…remember?” This game would be the death of him.
“Well, I remember I put it behind a midden heap.” The drunk nodded. “Good place to hide it. Everyone goes past the midden heap every day, see, but no one wants to stop there, ye ken?”
“Yes, I…I get that.” He wasn’t sure what a midden heap was but he was fairly sure he could get the idea. Something like a dump, perhaps. “So where’s the midden heap?”
“There are many midden heaps.”
“Oh, good.” It seemed he would have to spend his night digging through pixelated garbage. At least he didn’t have to smell it. “Well, let’s go looking, then. Because one way or another, you’ll pay for new armor for me.”
Lights still flickered in the windows as Justin looked through the town. He’d been enchanted by the settlement when he first saw it, but that hadn’t been when he had to search around every house and back alley. Now, he began to dislike the fact that there was so much detail in this game. Couldn’t this be a normal MMORPG village with five houses and three NPCs?
The first midden heap yielded nothing. He sighed, especially at the far too realistic game assets and squelching noises. At least his character didn’t sink into the pile of garbage. He didn’t think he could have dealt with that particular amount of realism.
“Not here,” Lyle announced finally.
“Uh-huh.” His entire body shuddered as a fly buzzed past him. Maybe the game designers should have spent their money making the liquid slosh in the beer mugs rather than adding realistic midden heaps.
That would go in the review, too.
They had reached the next midden heap when he heard footsteps and turned to see two men and another dwarf. They all had armor and weapons, and he suspected they would not be friendly NPCs. Were they a patrol group of mobs that showed up randomly in the towns at night?
“Well, well, well,” one of them said. “If it isn’t Lyle Stout.”
Apparently not. Justin was annoyed that Lyle had gotten him in trouble but he remembered that they were searching midden heaps instead of fighting enemies. This was a good development.
Of course, he still didn’t have any proper armor.
“Fellas.” The dwarf waved. “I was looking for your money.”
“Their money?” Justin asked, even more annoyed. That money was his for getting Lyle out of jail. He was beginning to understand, however, exactly why his new party member had been thrown into the jail so often.
His suspicions were only heightened when Lyle said, “Now, fellas…fellas. All of you will get what you were promised.”
“That’s the worst attempt I’ve ever seen to reassure someone,” Justin told him.
The conversation didn’t go anywhere, although that was because one of the bandits attacked. The man drew a dagger and smiled. “Well, maybe we remind you where you hid it, then—and get rid of some competition at the same time.”
They meant him, he realized. He drew his sword and scowled when the bandits laughed.
“You plan to fight with that?” one of them asked him.
“Yeah, well, have you ever had tetanus?” He swung his sword as hard as he could at one of the men. A little fatigue point floated across the screen, which he knew to ignore by now. Besides, he had struck the bandit, who grunted in pain. “Yeah, that’s right,” he told him. “I’m not gonna get Silver Tongue Level Two out of this fight. I’m gonna get Bandit Slayer Level One.”
No one appreciated his line, though, because his teammate barreled past him at full speed with a war cry. The dwarf launched into a flurry of punches and the two other bandits settled into fighting stances, their daggers out. Lyle had no weapons, but he didn’t seem worried about that fact—and when Justin saw the bandit dwarf become airborne and careen into the wall of the alleyway, he understood why.
He needed to focus on his attacker, though. His first slash with the sword again encountered only thin air and he circled away. When his attacker darted close with a dagger, Justin, trained on other video games, stepped into the charge and swung his weapon. He thought he felt a punch of pain across his ribs and he responded with a yell. This game was playing with his head. It had to be. It wasn’t like a VR headset could hook into your brain, after all, right?
AVOIDABLE INJURIES, LEVEL 1 displayed across the screen.
“Yeah, yeah,” he told the AI. “Very funny.”
He thought he heard it snicker at him. At least his blow had connected as well, though, and the bandit looked like he was at half-health. The man lunged into the same attack again and this time, Justin stepped out of the way, took the haft of his sword in both hands, and stabbed it sideways as his opponent barreled past him. The bandit uttered a gurgling groan and fell heavily, and his body disappeared.
THAT’S A SWORD, NOT A PIKE, LEVEL 1.
Justin rolled his eyes as he went to help Lyle with his battle. The dwarf seemed to have taken some damage, but he yelled a series of insults at his attackers, apparently not at all cowed by his injuries. Fortunately, he was enough of a distraction that Justin was able to sneak up behind both attackers one by one and kill them.
He looted the bodies and darted a look at Lyle. “You should heal yourself. Have some ham or something.”
“Hic.” The dwarf stared at him. “What does ham do?”
“You know. Eat some food, recover some health.”
His teammate gave him a look like he was insane. “A bandage is better for bleeding than a ham,” he said as if he thought he might be a raving lunatic.
Justin couldn’t help it and laughed aloud. This game had a good sense of humor, he’d give it that. He got serious again.
“All right. Time to find that treasure.”
Chapter Sixteen
Midden heap number two went well until they encountered the bugs. It was considerably less squelchy, for one thing. There seemed to be a considerable number of boards and pieces of metal and so on and fewer flies. Justin liked that.
In the next moment, he realized exactly why there weren’t scraps of vegetables and dozens of flies. The awareness was triggered by a sound he had never heard before, halfway between clicking and a squelch with maybe a hint of a rustle.
You didn’t have to have heard the noise before to know what it was, though. He grasped his sword, turned, and prayed for it to be a glitch in the game.
The cockroach, however, was the size of a small dog.
It spread its wings, hissed, and leapt straight at him.
Jacob was carrying a box of takeout into the corridor when he heard Amber scream. He had never heard her scream before. They’d been mugged once in Boston, and it had been the muggers who wound up screaming.
He burst into a sprint and raced through the kitchen. In his head, dozens of mental images clamored, none of them good. Maybe the people following them the first night had snuck in while he was gone. Or maybe she had electrocuted herself on one of the new additions to the pods. Maybe something was catastrophically wrong with Justin.
He didn’t expect to see Amber and Nick doubled over with silent laughter while they watched the monitors. Even DuBois was smiling, although in a bemused way.
Amber looked up. “Justin doesn’t like bugs,” she managed to say before she descended into giggles.
“What?” Jacob looked around, his heart pounding. “Wait—what? I heard you scream.”
“Not me.” She leaned on Nick’s shoulder, practically sobbing with laughter.
“Well, you’re the only girl here,” he said. “So—” H
e stopped and looked at the screen. A laugh suddenly bubbled in his chest. “You’re telling me…that was Justin?”
The others descended into gales of laughter and even DuBois chuckled.
“They’re doing the quest where they search for the dwarf’s treasure,” Nick explained as he wiped his eyes. “Remember that one?”
“Ohhhh.” He set the takeout bags on the floor and came to look, even though he couldn’t quite read all the output on the screen. “Yeah, the one with the midden heaps. Those were nasty. And those bugs were big.”
“And we didn’t even do it in VR,” Amber pointed out.
“Oh, God,” Jacob said. He gave a full-body shudder. “That would be terrifying.”
“Justin thinks so, too,” Nick said. He stretched to take a handful of popcorn from DuBois’s bag.
“That’s cheating,” Amber warned him. She settled in a chair. The audio that issued from Justin’s wires was now a constant stream of profanities as well as heartfelt pleas to God and some of the saints. “You know, we’re glad the parents weren’t here when that happened. But, damn, that was funny.”
Justin settled on a strategy he had decided to call, “Swing the sword every which way until eventually, all the giant cockroaches die.” It wasn’t a particularly catchy title, but it was about all he had the brainpower for at this particular moment.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.” Fatigue points flurried every which way and he should probably worry more about that, but these were giant cockroaches. Nature was not supposed to produce horrors like this. “Hail Mary, full of grace—”
Lyle, meanwhile, uttered little whoops every time one of his punches connected. He drove a fist down on a cockroach’s head. “That’ll teach you to bite me, you little bastard!”
“They bite?” Justin yelled, panicked. He drove his sword down and saw sparks when it connected with the cobblestones. These bugs were damned fast and he was not a fan of it. “Jesus Christ, how do I abandon a quest? Or—who’s the patron saint of giant-ass bugs? Does this fall under Francis or what?”
The cockroaches swarmed around him, their pincers clicking, and Jason gave another scream he wasn’t particularly proud of. He’d been happier when he knew they didn’t bite. In desperation, he whipped his sword around his head like a helicopter rotor and was pleased to see fewer cockroaches when he was finished. All he could hope was that some of them were dead.
Lyle knocked one out of the air with a punch and a guffaw. “Now, this—this is the kind of brawl I like.”
“Psychopath,” he muttered.
The bugs didn’t hit him, but his HP bar was over half gone from fatigue by the time the fight was over. His last kill—by plunging the sword straight down into a carapace—came with a sound he hoped never to hear again in his life. A moment of silence followed, punctuated only by the sounds of cows and owls.
“Well,” Justin said. He cleared his throat and tried to recover some of his dignity. “I, uh…I got the first ten levels of Wild Flailing. So that’s something.” He looked around. “Lyle?” He could only hope that the dwarf hadn’t been dragged off into a bug nest or something.
If he had, he would compose a nice eulogy and go home. There were limits to friendship.
Instead, his teammate popped up from behind the midden heap with a smile and a jingle of coins. “I found it!” he said triumphantly and held a pouch up. “Let’s get a drink to celebrate, shall we?”
Lyle accompanied him to the blacksmith’s shop. His vociferous complaints about the money’s best use didn’t override his dynamics as one of the party, especially when Justin snatched the coin purse out of his hand and marched off.
The farther they got from that particular midden heap, the better.
The sun had finally begun to come up, which was a good sign. The dwarf still complained about beer and food, and Justin’s stomach rumbled as well. Come to think of it, he had felt full after the stew he slurped at the inn, but that food was gone by now.
Also, it wasn’t real. He had to remind himself of that. This game was damned good at convincing him that it was actually life or death. He’d even begun to imagine he could smell things in the game, which was ridiculous.
One more quest, he told himself, and he’d go to sleep. How long had he been up, anyway?
They found the blacksmith at the edge of town, working bellows at the fire in the back of his workshop. A young man stood in the front, dressed in a soot-stained apron and the same brown, nondescript clothing as everyone else in the village.
“Would you like to buy anything, sir?” he asked.
“Yes,” Justin said, speaking over the dwarf’s refusal. “Show me what you have for armor.”
“Of course, sir.” The shop’s inventory appeared on the screen.
He scrolled through quickly. Everything was an upgrade, which was good, but he didn’t have much money. So much for the dwarf’s “reward.” He rolled his eyes at the amount he had. Two silver and two copper. He’d be able to buy much better gear after defeating the wizard but he needed the gear to defeat the wizard.
Maybe he could wander around outside town and slay bunnies for a while. Nah. What was the worst that could happen if he gave this quest a try? He’d have multiple attempts at the quest. Probably.
Justin was beginning to wish he’d run the tutorial.
Finally, he chose a set of leather armor that had some of the best stats he could find and equipped it. A window popped up to display what it looked like and he was pleased to see it was even nicer than Lyle’s, with a red wash on the edges of the leather panels and lacquered tiles around the ribs. It reminded him of some of the photos he’d seen of samurai armor.
He couldn’t afford it, though. With a sigh, he equipped a different set—the very lowest tier the blacksmith offered. He could see black studs in the leather and a very suspicious set of scorch marks.
While he wasn’t sure he wanted to know where this armor had come from, he would try to find out if there were dragons in the area. If his brain intended to treat this game like reality, he would make sure he didn’t get turned into Justin the Crispy.
With another heartfelt sigh, he made the trade. He still had sixty-two copper, which meant he might be able to afford something on the weapons as well.
“Do you have any swords?” he asked. When he saw the prices, he heaved a third sigh. He had become good at sighing but apparently, that wasn’t one of the things you got levels in. “Okay, can you do anything for my existing sword? Sharpen it, or—”
“Of course, sir. We’ll remove some of the rust and sharpen it for you. Twenty copper.”
“Done.” Justin handed it over. He wasn’t sure how it would work to remove the rust, given that the sword seemed to be largely composed of the stuff, but this was a game and game worlds were better than the real world in most ways.
For instance, the boy handed the sword directly to him and he didn’t have to wait at all. The blade didn’t look like it would ever be on a list of famous fantasy swords, but it was recognizably made of metal now and it did look sharper. He equipped it and saw that his damage had increased by almost fifty percent.
Excellent.
Did his armor…smell? It kind of smelled—like smoke and bacon or, at least, he hoped it was bacon. He thought of the scorch marks and felt a little queasy.
“Have a nice day, sir,” the shop boy told him.
“You, too,” he said automatically. He turned and ducked into the sunlight, only to see a man waiting for him. It was an NPC with a blue band of cloth around his arm and he held a small package.
The man’s hand extended quickly and proffered the package.
“O…kay?” Justin took it, at which point the NPC simply stood where he was and blinked stupidly in the sunlight. After a moment of staring at him, Justin took a cautious step around him and walked away. At the end of the street, he looked back.
The NPC was still there and still stared at the side of the blacksmith’s shop.
“We
could have made that a little smoother,” Jacob said to Nick.
“Hey,” the other man protested. “I’m not a game designer. He delivered the package.”
“So what will he do now?”
“I don’t know.” Nick stared at him. “I didn’t tell him to do anything other than that.”
Jacob sighed. Not for the first time, he reflected, it was damned good they’d bought the game rather than trying to make it themselves.
With no money left for a proper meal or an inn room, the two teammates headed out of town to make camp. It turned out there was a command for that, at which point the dwarf produced a campfire out of thin air—complete with a ring of stones—and Justin spent a few moments learning how to get the rabbit legs in his inventory to cook.
They smelled good—or, at least, he must be hungry enough that he imagined they smelled good. He sat on the ground and heaved a sigh. He’d never played anything quite this engrossing, glitches and all, but he was tired. He was suddenly so tired. His whole body seemed to ache.
Then, he remembered the package. He opened his inventory and found it, and the inventory screen disappeared to leave him with a strange bracelet in one hand. For a moment, he frowned, tried to decide what to do, and decided he’d play along. If this was a trick from the evil wizard, he’d at least have a good laugh about it. He slipped it onto his wrist.
He didn’t turn into a frog but an image did pop up in front of him, superimposed over the now-frozen fire. Even Lyle was stilled in mid-motion.
The man in the picture had grey hair and a bushy beard and he wore a white lab coat.
“Hello, Justin,” he said. “I’m Dr. DuBois.”
Chapter Seventeen
“You’re who?” Justin asked blankly.
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