Masters of Strata (Deepest Dungeon #2) - A LitRPG series

by G. D. Penman

  He needed that sharpness, because his eyes, nose and mouth were full of setting wax. He couldn’t see and he couldn’t breathe. Throwing himself forward, staggering to his feet and sloshing yet more wax up and over his legs, Martin tried to run.

  [Skaife has suffered 3 fire damage]

  Onward he stumbled, fumbling at the wax on his face, straining with all the strength of his ratty jaws to pull his mouth open and breathe again. He could feel the fur tearing away from his skin all around his mouth, but still he did not stop. The heat around his legs was burning now, scalding him slowly as it melted through and then replaced the wax wrapped around him. The blessing had passed sometime in the midst of his confusion.

  [Skaife has suffered 3 fire damage]

  Hands grasped at him, and in his panic Martin pushed them away and went on running. Sloshing more and more wax up onto himself, coating himself to the waist.

  Not like this.

  Drowning had been bad enough, but suffocating on corpse wax – it was unbearable. He started beating at his own face with his locked fist, trying to crack the wax away.

  [Skaife has suffered 3 bludgeoning damage]

  [Skaife has suffered 1 environmental damage]

  Environmental Damage, Martin remembered that. It was the game’s polite way of saying suffocation. The whole dungeon was out to kill them, not just the monsters. He stumbled forward one more step and his foot came down on nothingness. The wax-fall at the end of the cave. He’d gone too far. Desperately, he tried to fling himself back, not even caring if he landed in the wax so long as he didn’t fall, but the weight that he had accumulated would not let him stop, slow or redirect his momentum.

  He was going over, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  Five

  The Claws of the Felidavan

  The same hands that he’d shrugged off so easily a moment before latched onto Martin. Feathers tickled at his neck. Some great furred claw closed around his tail. A stick was thrust across the gap he was heading toward, a barrier to hold him back. The guild grabbed him and dragged him back from the precipice. Back to the safety of solid ground.

  [Skaife has suffered 3 environmental damage]

  Jericho’s bulk pinned him to the ground. Julia’s cool hands cradled the sides of his face. Stroking and soothing. He couldn’t breathe. Didn’t they understand that he couldn’t breathe? The knife split through the wax and the tip scraped over his teeth. It should have hurt, but there was no pain in Strata. Hot, rank air swept into Martin’s mouth and it was sweeter than anything he’d ever tasted in his life.

  Able to breathe now, the panic flooded out of Martin. The rest could be dealt with, all that mattered was the air filling him up. Lindsay worked her way along the line of his mouth with her blade tip, muttering away.

  “I thought you were meant to be the smart one?”

  She worked far more carefully around his one working eye, slicing a circle out of the wax and then plucking it, and his eyelashes, off with one tug. Martin made a little squawk of protest, but again, there was no pain, so he couldn’t really complain. He blinked blearily until his eye could adjust to the light. “I never want to do that again.”

  Jericho was rumbling with laughter as he climbed off Martin, “Did baby boy trip over in goop?”

  “I found something, up at the source of the river.” Martin held up his locked fist to Lindsay. “Help me.”

  Between the two of them they cut and levered at his hand until it opened. The glinting, angular metal of a deep key was there, just waiting for them to use. Lindsay crowed with victory. “That’s the good stuff.”

  Julia and Jericho seemed to be having a low-key argument throughout the whole conversation, culminating in her voice finally being raised loud enough for Lindsay and Martin to hear: “… doesn’t deserve it!”

  With a flash, Julia disappeared in a pillar of light, leaving Jericho to bashfully mumble. “We are going to take five-minute break, get snacks. You wax off, rat-boy.”

  He logged out too, leaving Martin and Lindsay alone in the candlelight and stench. She couldn’t grin with a beak, not really, but there was a certain angle to her head that gave it away. “So, here’s the new plan, we dip you back in the river, light your tail – Martin candle. We’d never have to buy a torch again.”

  She was running her knife carefully along the edge of the wax on his face, so he tried not to move too much as he answered. “And I’d be warm for the rest of my life.”

  She flung up her hands with a laugh. “It is win-win!”

  “Except in the sense of anyone winning.”

  Lindsay peeled away the wax mask from his face in one solid piece. It pulled some fur away with it, but mostly his face remained intact.

  She set to work on freeing his arms next, trying not to nick him, but giving him a pretty thorough fur-trim by the by. “On the subject of winning…”

  Martin sighed. “Here it comes…”

  “You really got nothing useful on your little field trip?” She poked him playfully with the tip of the knife. “Nothing at all?”

  For a long moment Martin was silent as he tried to organize his thoughts, then eventually he told her. “I got a lot of conflicting information that I haven’t been able to process yet. Some technical stuff about the NIH, nothing much about the game itself. I’ve been told that there is an NPC in the game somewhere that I need to keep an eye out for, but I’ve been given no indication of their name, location, anything.”

  Lindsay pulled a slab of wax off his thigh with a grunt. “Okay, that is worse than nothing. That is annoying.”

  “If I find this NPC, it will probably help a lot.” Martin was mostly talking to himself at this point. Lindsay was busying herself hacking off the worst of the wax. “I’ll get a lot of useful intel on the Masters, a lot of ideas on how the game was made, but the guy I went to talk to... he… he won’t be talking to me anymore.”

  With a crack the coating on his back broke away. “More of that classic Martin charm, winning people over to the Iron Riot cause?”

  He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, feeling more wax flaking away from the creases with every movement. “It’s a dead end.”

  She slugged him in the shoulder, knocking off another sheet of wax to shatter by his feet. “This is why you let me do all the talking.”

  His tail lashed, ostensibly to flick off the wax, but mostly with annoyance. “You do all the talking because you are the leader of the guild, and because there is no force in this world or any other that can make you stop talking.”

  The worst of the wax was hacked away, and Martin could only hope that the rest might flake off as time wore on. The stuff in his fur probably wouldn’t, but he’d had more than enough of Lindsay plucking him over for one day.

  She was halfway through another quip when the other two returned, carrying with them a tense silence that somehow smothered even Lindsay’s ability to talk nonsense. Martin picked himself up and used his Healing Touch to restore what the wax had taken, and then they all headed back the way they came.

  The chamber remained abandoned, apart from Speckles perched on one of the archways like a cheap rubber gargoyle, and the Deep Gate opened easily to the touch of the key. There was something more arcane than the simple unlocking of a door to these gates. Martin knew that anyone else in the room with them at this moment would still see only the locked gate, while they could tell the metal within the frame had irised open.

  Everyone had to earn a key for themselves, or their guild had to have one. It wasn’t as thorough as the instancing of the Archduke rooms, but it did mean that for all that Strata was a flowing ecosystem in one direction, the perceptions of all the players could be made to differ easily enough. This was all simple mechanical stuff that others had tinkered with and talked about before Martin even laid hands on a NIH, but it was still vital to know.

  If it ever came to a fight with other players – the kind that Martin knew that the Brotherhood in Exile were
tooling up for – knowing that there was a sanctuary on the other side of a Deep Gate could mean the difference between victory and death. He hadn’t made any attempts at firing off his one ranged attack through a gate yet to see if it interfered, but he wagered that it wouldn’t.

  The game-design philosophy of Strata always seemed to give priority to those who had pushed further ahead rather than those lagging behind. From what little he had seen of the Masters, it would probably please them to know that the strong were punching down at the weak and exploiting their content gating to do so.

  The tunnel on the far side continued straight ahead for only a few steps before it turned into a downward spiral like the one that had taken them to the river and the key. The plain gray stone of the column they were following down was streaked with wax here and there, where the pressure had built up enough behind the stone to push it out through the cracks.

  The walls were not hot, to the touch, but warm as a living body — like the stone was flesh. It was enough to make Martin tuck his arms in tight against his sides and ignore the comfort that the support of something solid to hang onto would have brought.

  Given his general uselessness in combat situations, Speckles had been dubbed the guild’s packhorse as much as their mascot. All of the miscellaneous bits and pieces that Martin had Lindsay pick up when they passed through a settlement were loaded onto the little frog-man’s back. Among that load were a bevy of waterskins. Drinking and eating in Strata could provide players with little buffs, but dousing Speckles in water every so often kept him operating at peak capacity. Martin considered it to be a small but worthwhile investment. The sudden sloshing of overflowing water past her feet made Lindsay jump, but it had evaporated away before they got to the next twist of the spiral stairs.

  It didn’t grow warmer as they went deeper, so there was no reason to suspect that they were heading into a lava level. It would have been about par for the course after the swampy section of the first ten deeps. Elemental levels were a mainstay of game design for a reason, four free themes that the Masters didn’t need to think too hard about. Martin would have been more surprised if they didn’t have to deal with a lava river at some point.

  As they went deeper and deeper, more cracks began to appear, broader gaps that the rest of them just saw as darkness, but which Martin’s Murovan eye could penetrate. More corpses, crammed together and stacked up. More dead bodies than he could even wrap his head around. So many dead. Obviously meant to fill them with dread.

  They were walking on corpses? That just made Martin even more determined to make it through. These weren’t dead people, they were competitors, the ones who had tried their luck and lost. He wasn’t like them. He was different. He was going to live through this dungeon. He was going to make it to the Heart and spit in its eye and go down in history.

  The spiral smoothed out into a horizontal tunnel again abruptly, the same plain silica-speckled gray stone running like a red carpet between twin streams of flowing wax on either side. The tunnel widened out as the guild continued to progress forward at a snail’s pace until they were in a chamber bigger than Martin’s hotel room, and more than twice the size of his apartment. Lindsay had regained the bounce in her step at the prospect of a fight. “So, where’s the big scary monster you promised us Martin?”

  “I didn’t say there was definitely a big monster, just that there is some powerful force disrupting the…”

  She cut him off with a loud snoring sound that set her whole beak vibrating.

  She stamped out in front of the group and put her fists on her hips. She bellowed. “You said giant monsters. We all heard you. Give me giant monsters or give me death.”

  [Tesra has suffered 27 piercing damage]

  The arrow burst out through her stomach and showered them all in a spritz of her blood. She looked down, then back up at them, her beak working but no sound coming out. Martin was already in motion. His shoulder hit Lindsay in the legs, knocking her on her ass. Two more arrows flitted overhead. Without looking back, he barked, “Cover!” and the other two scattered to look for some.

  Speckles was not so well trained. He froze on the spot and caught an arrow to the shoulder for his lack of urgency. He let out a trilling shriek, but there was nothing Martin could do for him right now.

  Martin barked, “Stay down,” then grabbed at Lindsay to drag her to safety, and stabbed himself in the paw with the damned arrow in the process.

  [Skaife has suffered 2 piercing damage]

  Ripping it out of his hand fast, he caught onto a belt buckle and hauled her across the floor as more arrows rained down. “Get off. Get off.”

  Once she was sassing him again, it was apparent she was back in control of her faculties, so Martin did just as she said, leaping away from her and readying his only ranged attack, Javelin of Faith.

  The enemy were smart enough to stick to the deep shadows at the far side of the chamber, so Martin stripped them of their advantage. He lobbed the javelin not to hit anyone in particular but to explode in a shower of white sparks against the stone and give away the enemies’ positions.

  There were at least a dozen of them scattered behind columns of hardened wax at the far end of the room. If the guild had any sort of elemental damage to bring to bear, they could have stripped them of their cover in an instant.

  There was nothing between those pillars and Iron Riot. Not one scrap of cover. It was a killing ground. Good thing Martin had never expected the game to be fair.

  “No cover. Charge!”

  Lindsay had rolled to her feet and drawn her daggers. “Fastball special?”

  “Coming right up.” Martin dropped to one knee, another arrow flitting past his shoulder. He counted down in his head, calculating the angles and the distances, tracing the arrow’s flight back along the course they were taking toward him. Lindsay leapt over him, and at the last moment he thrust his hand straight up and cast Rebuke. The roof wasn’t as high in here as Martin would have liked, but Lindsay barely scraped it in her arc across to bowl over the one enemy who was stupid enough to try and shoot her in mid-air.

  Martin’s one-knee crouch became a sprinter’s starting position with a little spring of his legs, and then he was off and running. The archers were too distracted by the dervish crow girl in their midst to fire anything off. They weren’t liable to notice anybody as small as Martin anyway. Not with Jericho bearing down on them at full stomping pelt, roaring at the top of his lungs the whole way. The roar reverberated through the chamber. Through their bones. Even Martin felt like he should be running from that noise, and they were ostensibly on the same team.

  With the distance closed Martin lit up his sword with Celestial Strike and was close enough to swing at the nearest vaguely humanoid figure before he remembered his new ability. Introit sounded like a gong when he cast it. Reverberations of the spell fluttered out like ripples of light from the source. The source in this case being a very startled looking cat-man.

  [Felidavan Ambusher has suffered 42 light damage]

  The cat-man that had marked him as its target stood about a head taller than Martin, and had the distinct colorations of a Siberian Tiger, right down to the drooling fangs it was now baring with a hiss. It was a cat, he was a rat. There was a reason rats did not start fights with cats. Or so the screaming terror in his hindbrain kept screaming at him.

  Martin ignored it, ducking a swipe of claws.

  [MISS]

  He caught the other attack on its descent, nipping fingers and their inbuilt claws off neatly just above the pads of the cat-man’s palm.

  [Felidavan Ambusher has suffered 12 light damage]

  [Felidavan Ambusher has suffered 11 slashing damage]

  The cat-man shrieked but Martin wasn’t going to stop pressing his advantage now. He empowered his sword again with Smite, surrounding it in a golden nimbus rather than the internal glow of Celestial Strike he was more accustomed to. He swiped at the kitty’s face.

  [MISS]

&nbs
p; Faster than Martin could blink, the cat-man ducked and danced away. Luck and surprise had been on his side for that first swing, but now he had to compete with the raw agility of a natural-born acrobat. At least the glow on his sword was still there, egging him on.

  The cat-man glanced down at its missing fingers, then the blackened mark on its pelt where his resonating word had struck, and then back at Martin and his little glowing sword. It showed its teeth. It wasn’t snarling. It was grinning.

  Martin came on, swiping and swinging and hitting nothing but air as the enemy danced a merry jig around him, purring.

  [MISS]

  [MISS]

  [MISS]

  “Will you stand still?”

  The cat-man’s purr turned into a laugh. “Would you?”

  It stopped Martin in his tracks for a moment. This wasn’t another mindless monster, this was a thinking creature like the Anurvans. Martin could reason with them. He could win them over.

  [Skaife has suffered 29 piercing damage]

  An arrow was vibrating in Martin’s leg, deep enough that he could feel the tip scraping bone. That telltale chill of serious damage started to spread out from the puncture. He held up his hands. “Wait.”

  “No waiting. No standing still. Only this.”

  Claws raked over Martin’s face, cutting clean through the strap of his eyepatch and opening the ragged scars beneath.

  [Skaife has suffered 18 slashing damage]

  No pain, but the unmistakable sensation of blood gushing out. If he’d turned his head the wrong way, Martin would be blind now. As it was, he could see the wicked smile spreading on the cat-man’s face as it failed to press its advantage. It stalked closer as he staggered backward.