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

by G. D. Penman

  Martin closed his mouth and waited. He glanced across at Julia and saw a similar expression to his own on her face. Deliberately neutral. Giving nothing away. Unhelpful.

  Jericho rolled his eyes. “Little frog is a joke. He does not help, he does not matter. We should never have brought him from the beginning. Waste of time. Waste of effort.”

  Lindsay prodded the big man in his chest. “He gives us intel for the deeps ahead.”

  “He gives us nothing useful and costs us hours of pointless questions and sneaking past other players. Losing him, this is a blessing incognito. In disguise.”

  Lindsay poked him again, though he didn’t seem to notice. “He saved your ass in the Archduke fight!”

  “Anyone could have done the same.” Jericho shrugged. “He is just a distraction. Not just another body for me to protect, but for big-brain rat-boy too. If Martin would stop trying to make friends with every monster that talks we wouldn’t have lost to the cats.”

  Lindsay cocked her head as if conceding that point, prompting Martin to interject. “We would have lost that one anyway. We were all already poisoned before they talked.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Monsters are monsters.”

  Martin had to bite back a reply, managing to snip his response back to, “The game is not that simple.”

  “It can be. It can all be simple if you stop making it hard.” Jericho’s grin split his face open all over again. Martin couldn’t tell if he was showing his teeth to intimidate or if he was genuinely happy for some reason. “It is a race to the bottom. We need to go down, so let’s go down.”

  “You know what. You boys can measure the length of your… tails later. This isn’t a democracy. I’m in charge, and I say we go and get Speckles,” said Lindsay.

  Jericho looked down at Lindsay with open contempt. It was the first time Martin had seen Jericho direct that expression toward anyone other than him. Even when he’d seen it before, Jericho had made sure he was the only one. “Why are you in charge? You are least useful member of the guild. Martin, his brain. We need it. I accept this. Me and Julia, we carry Iron Riot through every fight. But you, what do you do? Make silly noises? Throw us into fights we can’t win? Why do we listen to you?”

  This wasn’t meant to be happening yet. Martin wasn’t ready for it. Martin expected this kind of outright rebellion and rancor after they’d bounced off the same Archduke fight a few times, but not now, not over whether to rescue an NPC. Jericho was even less stable than he’d anticipated.

  He needed time to think. He had to say something to diffuse the conflict. They needed to be further through the dungeon before the external pressure could counterbalance the internal. It was inevitable that there would be interpersonal conflict, that was the nature of playing multiplayer games, but once they were deep enough their reliance on one another would prevent the guild from breaking up. If they fragmented this soon, there was too great a possibility for alternatives. Any one of them could go off and join another guild to continue their journey. If they weren’t ahead of the pack then Lindsay’s hold on them was…

  Lindsay put her wings on her hips. “Alright. You want to vote, let’s vote.”

  Jericho scoffed. “I say we move on. What do you say, Julia? Do we move on, or go chasing after frog-boy, who is already dead and eaten by cats?”

  Jericho didn’t even turn back to look at Julia. If he had, he would have seen all the expressions chasing over her face in the long moment of silence. Martin wasn’t the best judge of emotion, but anger seemed to be a big one. Her tail was lashing, even as he caught glimpses of sadness and exasperation. Jericho expected her to back him. Because they were in a relationship, he thought he was entitled to her support. Another crack, another place where Martin could insert a crowbar if he needed to. She swallowed all of the things she was clearly feeling, and said: “I abstain.”

  Jericho’s head snapped around as if this was a betrayal instead of a very measured response. “You what?”

  “Abstain. You must have heard that one before.” Lindsay seemed positively giddy. Like she was living for Jericho’s discomfort. Martin hated confrontation. Lindsay crackled with energy after every argument. “It means she doesn’t want to vote. You know, the way things normally are, when we don’t make everyone vote on everything. When I’m in charge. Like I am now.”

  Jericho turned and pointed at Martin with a glimmer of malice in his eyes. “Brainbox still needs to vote. He will tell you frog-boy is useless. He will tell you, and you will listen because you all love him so much.”

  Lindsay turned to Martin expecting compliance. Her temper flared when she could see that he was thinking things over. “Oh, come on.”

  He held up his hands. “You both have valid points.”

  “Come on, dude, it is Speckles.” There was a pleading whine to her voice. “Your hippy hoppy little buddy.”

  “The Felidavans didn’t seem to have any bad intentions toward him. He is probably safer there with them than he ever was with us. Exploring Strata isn’t exactly good for your health.”

  Lindsay crossed her wings over her chest. “Yeah, he’s perfectly safe. Until they get hungry.”

  Martin cocked his head to one side as he thought that point through too. This was what they wanted. They wanted him to think everything through and solve all of their problems. If that was what they wanted, then that was what he would give them. “They don’t strike me as cannibalistic, but if we assume that their animal traits will come to the fore then, as felines, they would be more likely to torture him to death for their own amusement.”

  “Oh. My. God.” Lindsay squawked. “We have to go rescue him!”

  Martin gave her an insincere smile. “I don’t believe that their animal traits will be coming to the fore any time soon, they were intelligent. More than just cunning, genuinely intelligent, smarter than most of the humans playing this game, if I’m being honest, capable of adapting to their circumstances and pro-actively resolving their problems.”

  “Why don’t you just marry them?”

  He sighed. “My point is two-fold. I don’t believe that Speckles is in any danger, and I believe that we are.”

  “Danger?” Jericho rumbled with laughter. “Hah. You are scared to go face the angry kitties?”

  There was no point in denying it. The Felidavans wiped the floor with them last time around and Martin wasn’t in any rush for a repeat performance. “I am cautious about running headlong into an organized enemy that has already beaten us with ease. But no. Now that I’m aware of their tactics, I’m fairly confident I can devise a counter.”

  Julia’s brows had drawn down. Sometimes, Martin suspected that she was the only one in the guild who actually listened to him instead of just cherry picking what they wanted to hear to support their biases and goals. “Then what?” she asked.

  “If we go up there and clear out the Felidavans, we are going to be creating more problems for ourselves in the future. Without them there to serve as a blockade, the next guild to come along will be able to blast right through and catch up to us. As it is, they are defending our backs, allowing us to direct our full attention forward.”

  Lindsay crossed the space between them in a moment, vibrating with irritation. “Let me get this straight. You want to leave Speckles behind because the people who took him hostage are convenient?”

  Once again, there was no point in denying it. “Yes.”

  Jericho roared with laughter, stomping over to clap Martin on the shoulder with enough force to rock him, friendly again now that he thought he was getting his way. Like a spoiled toddler. “You… You are cold blooded, my friend. I know that Julia is meant to be lizard here, but you – I think there is frost in your veins.”

  Lindsay was looking genuinely hurt, but Martin didn’t say what he said next to appease her. He did it to burst Jericho’s bubble of smugness. “On the other hand, Speckles has been invaluable to us as we progressed, providing intelligence that we’d have no other way o
f accessing, and providing an insight into both the mechanical functions of the dungeon and the mentality of the creatures that dwell here.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about!” Lindsay bounced on the balls of her feet. “Cute little frog-boy is the ace up our sleeve.”

  “Well no. Sorry.” He couldn’t even let her have that. Not if he was being honest, and if he couldn’t be relied on to give honest situational assessments then the whole structure of the guild was irrevocably ruined. “I think I have probably already tapped out the limits of his insight, and now I mostly want him along because he provides a fifth body for group positioning without being too demanding in terms of treasure and experience sharing.”

  “Well, which is it? Is he useless? Do we need him? Come on. You’ve got the deciding vote here.” Jericho barked at him, bringing Martin’s patience that little bit closer to its limit.

  “I think… that it doesn’t matter what I think.”

  The other two were flabbergasted, while Julia still had enough sense to ask, “What?”

  “Regardless of whether we want to go and retrieve Speckles or press on, we don’t have the wherewithal to do either. So, let’s focus on the problem at hand. We should explore this deep and find both the Skip Gate and the entrance from above. My Rite of Passage will be ready by tomorrow, so if we can find both of those gates today that provides us with ample time to retrieve Speckles, if that is what we decide to do.”

  “But Speckles…”

  He cut Lindsay off. “Irrelevant until we find the gates.”

  “But we are running out of time…”

  He cut Jericho off too. “Irrelevant until we find the gates.”

  “So, you want us to just…”

  He cut Julia off, just for the symmetry of it. “Find both of the gates, then we can make a decision.”

  Lindsay had recovered enough from her confusion to come back at him again with, “But what if…”

  He held up both hands. “Less talking. More moving.”

  Eight

  Curses of the Carved

  The decision was not well received by either side of the debate, and both Jericho and Lindsay stalked off ahead of Martin as they began to explore, grumbling under their breaths the whole way. That was how he knew he had reached a perfect compromise. Nobody was happy. Least of all him. Interpersonal conflict was his bread and butter in the context of games, but when it became conversational conflict, it always left him feeling drained and empty.

  It wasn’t that he couldn’t navigate them, or that he couldn’t keep up, he just felt like he shouldn’t have to. Everyone had access to the same information as him, so why weren’t his solutions obvious to them too? He felt like he had to talk at half-speed so that people could follow him, and even then they made him backtrack to explain logical leaps, which were really more like logical baby-steps.

  Either he explained things in such simple terms that he felt like a moron or he was called condescending. Neither felt good, and walking the tightrope between them was why he’d always delighted in employing Lindsay and her bottomless well of positivity as a buffer.

  The tunnels were wrought from the same gray stone as the deep above, but where it had shown cracks where the corpse wax bled through, these walls were solid. Martin drifted close enough to run his hand over the ridges in the stone. They weren’t any sort of natural formation. Vertical waves had been painstakingly carved into the rock. Above his head height, the waves turned into whorls. Then above that, as the tunnel curved smoothly up to the roof, he could make out carvings of what looked like birds or possibly Corvans.

  His low-light vision was struggling in the utter darkness of these tunnels. His little species had been built to dwell in the dark corners of the earth, and even he found it hard to pierce the shadows in this place. The darkness had to be by design. Every part of Strata had been dark, of course. It was an underground complex of caves and tunnels, a dungeon, they were inherently dark places. But this was the first time he felt like that darkness was being deliberately cultivated to keep things out of sight.

  He sincerely doubted that the Masters had gone to the trouble of designing the textures for the walls just to hide them, so that meant that the darkness was for some other purpose than disrupting his ability to decipher the local art. It was the echo of his shuffling footsteps that made him realize what it was.

  These winding tunnels, full of junctions and dead ends, were the perfect hunting ground for an ambush predator. This was the deep where the Night Ravagers were meant to be.

  The others had torches lit and their attention turned forward, but Martin slowed his pace to trail behind Julia. If he was right, and this was the Ravager’s home turf, then they would not be attacking from the front. With Jericho’s class switched over to Heretic, Martin was the only one capable of producing light damage, which meant that he needed to be on the front line when the attack came, even if he could feel every strand of fur on the back of his body standing to attention.

  His ears were flattened back against his skull, straining for the telltale sound of a Ravager behind them. The drip of oil from its skin. The click of a metallic claw against the stonework. Even just the mistimed scuff of one of his own footsteps echoing back to him at the wrong time.

  They had to be here, just out of sight. His whole body thrummed with tension as he strained to hear them, to filter out the sound of Iron Riot as they plodded along.

  Give in.

  His ears hadn’t picked up a sound, but still he heard that voice nipping at the hindquarters of his brain. Not from beneath him, not from the depths of his dreams, but from the tunnel behind them. He stopped dead and turned.

  The others would have seen nothing but darkness, but in Martin’s low-light vision the Night Ravager’s eyes lit up like a cat’s. The green glow piercing the shadows. Telling him that he was being watched. That he was being followed. That he was being hunted.

  You belong to me.

  The ravagers were different from the other monsters. They were more like the Archdukes or the optional boss that they’d found. They seemed to be less independent, more connected to the Dungeon. The obvious visual cue was that green glow that seemed to accompany all of the Heart’s personal creations, but the fact that they could serve as its mouthpiece in his hallucinations had to mean something too.

  Martin tried not to think too hard about the fact that the others couldn’t hear the voice from down in the dark. Hearing voices other people couldn’t was never a good sign. Next, he’d be wearing a tinfoil hat or trying to tune into AM radio with his braces. Yet, now, he found that he had to think about it.

  If he had to think about it, he was going to do it on his own terms. It didn’t matter if he was suffering from some sort of psychosis, or if this was just some hidden mechanic of the game like the lovely scars that the Archdukes had left him with. All that mattered was the practicality. This was the reality of his situation – when a Night Ravager got close enough, Martin could hear it whispering to him in his mind. What it said did not matter right now. All that mattered was that he had a built-in early warning system if the Night Ravagers were attempting to set up an ambush.

  Come to me. Live for me. Die for me. Live again. Live forever in my darkness. Let me inside you.

  Martin lit up his sword with Celestial Strike and immediately the little green dots of light deep in the tunnel blinked out. The whispering receded as the Ravager fled. The system worked.

  Martin turned back, almost crashing right into Julia. She was watching him with an unreadable expression on her face. Lizard facial expressions were hard, and Martin struggled with reading normal human ones at the best of times. He didn’t like ambiguity. “What?”

  She cocked her head to one side. “What were you doing?”

  “Nothing.” He paused for a moment then shook his head, of course he’d been doing something. “I mean… I thought I heard something, so I lit up my sword, but there was nothing there.”

  She stepped in
closer. Studying his expression. “So, you didn’t see anything?”

  “I think that the Ravager is still following us, but it didn’t come close enough for me to get a proper look. If it is following us. Which it might not be.”

  She cast a glance along the tunnel, but not like she was looking at anything particular, just that she was trying not to look right at him. “I saw something.”

  “Yeah?”

  She glanced back at him, then away again just as quickly. “I saw what happened before, with the Night Ravager, when it wouldn’t attack you.”

  “Light damage is…”

  She cut him off. Julia never did that. It was enough to really make him pay attention. “That doesn’t explain what I saw. I know what I saw. It was happy to kill the rest of us, but not you. Do you know why?”

  Rats didn’t sweat, but he still found himself reaching up to brush across the hair on his forehead. “I really think you’re reading too much into it.”

  She let out a groan of exasperation. The kind she usually reserved for raid wipes. “Martin, you read too much into everything. That is what you do. All day long. So why wouldn’t you read anything into this? If you’re so sure about this, then what about the scars? None of us are getting scarred when we fight the Archdukes, but no matter how much I heal you, there are still marks left behind.”

  He shrugged. “It’s cosmetic. It doesn’t affect gameplay. It doesn’t matter.”

  “You aren’t the only one getting injured in those fights.” She caught him by the shoulder. “I know, I’m the one that has to heal all the damage that is done. So why are you the only one ending up missing an eye?”

  Now he couldn’t look her in the eye. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters, Martin. You matter. If something is targeting you, if the Masters are doing this to you out of spite or something, you need to let us help you. You need to file a complaint, or at least change how we do things so you aren’t always in the line of fire until it gets sorted out.”