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

by G. D. Penman

  “All that work, for nothing.” Martin pulled back from Lindsay. “Let’s just call it a night.”

  Julia cocked her head at Martin. he had never, in the entire history of their acquaintance, ever wanted to stop gaming before midnight. “But what shall we do about…?”

  “Give me a night to think on it, work out where we are going next.” He smiled at her. He’d been practicing his smiles. They were convincing enough now that only Lindsay ever really saw through them, and even then only if it wasn’t to her advantage to pretend they were genuine. “A few hours of that good old plotting and planning.”

  “Well, I mean, what is there to plan? Don’t we go through this gate?” She gestured to the plinth, which was already sinking down into the ground to reveal the metallic ring that outlined each of the iris-locked gates. “Surely the Sentinel had the key?”

  Martin’s smile remained fixed in place. Not everyone could remember everything at all times. This was a normal human failing. Getting irritated about it would just make him look like he was the one in the wrong. That was why Lindsay had stopped him going off about Jericho. It didn’t matter that the man had screwed them all over, what mattered was what happened now. What happened next. “This is just a regular gate. We’re looking for the Skip Gate to the next Archduke.”

  Julia scoffed. “So you intend to stick with that plan, even though it took us all day to find this one?”

  Lindsay spoke over him. “We’ve got to go and rescue our boys. Wolf boy and frog boy. We need to go up, not down.”

  Martin took a deep breath. Losing his temper would not help anything. He needed calm and he needed time to think. “What we all really need is a good night’s sleep.”

  “You’re creeping me out, man. Are you a pod person? Are you pod-Martin?” Lindsay crept closer again and started prodding him around the face. “Have you been replaced by a big cabbage? Is there any way to know the difference since you already smelled like cabbage?”

  Still smiling blankly, he answered. “You’re a delight to know.”

  “I’ll just tell him that we’re done, then.” Julia’s knowing smirk was all too familiar to Martin. It was the same one that Lindsay had shared all the way through Jericho and Julia’s flirtations. He often found that disabusing people of their illusions about his relationship with Lindsay just made things more complicated, so he said nothing. Julia finished up with, “Uh… Same time tomorrow?”

  He smiled at her again, warmly, even as Lindsay’s aggressive poking tipped his head to the side. “Let’s assume so. I’ll ping you or Jericho a message if that changes.”

  Still with that same knowing smirk on her face, Julia closed her eyes and then vanished in a pillar of light. Gone from the world of the game, and out of the equation for the conversations that were to come. Good.

  Lindsay stopped poking him and stared intently instead. Martin stared right back. She narrowed her eyes. He showed no expression. She crept closer until her beak was almost touching the tip of his snout and still he didn’t flinch. She fell back and grumbled. “Alright, man. You’re holding out on me. I know you are. You know stuff and things, and now the rest of them are gone you are going to spill it. You’ve been totally freaking out about stuff that it makes no sense to freak out about, and totally chill about things that should have had you nibbling your little ratty nails off. What gives?”

  His smiling practice had extended to smaller smiles. Smiles that gave nothing away. He gave one of those a try. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Your fieldtrip. You went off all hyped up and ready to come back with some amazing research stuff to help break through the game, just like when you did that whole online learning course about Norse Mythology when we were playing Dracolich.” She prodded him in the chest. “What do you know? Don’t make me shine a lamp in your eyes. Eye. Whatever. I will invent electricity. Then the lamp. Then shine it in your eye.”

  The same smile. Small. Affirming her feelings without giving away any of his. It had taken him years to master it on his human face, but everything in Strata came so much easier to him. “There’s nothing to tell, it was a dead end.”

  She closed the distance again, hissing in a low voice. “You were going to meet one of the game devs, or something. Someone behind the scenes, so you could get the scoop. The big-brain knowledge. How does that turn into a dead end?”

  Martin tried to maintain his façade of calm for a moment, but it was getting nowhere with Lindsay. He should have known better than trying to dissuade her with boredom. The girl could not be bored. Left to her own devices, she was a perpetual engine of self-amusement. The only thing that would stop her damned inquisition was the truth. Or at least enough of the truth to stop her dead in her tracks. So that was what Martin did. He told the truth.

  “He killed himself.”

  It was as though the words didn’t register for a moment, then Lindsay squawked, “He what?”

  Martin took a deep breath and glanced around at the walls of the room. It was a gate chamber, a fixed position in the layout of the dungeon, something that the Masters couldn’t shuffle around without doing some major reconstruction work in the adjoining deep. The kind of work that would not escape notice if it were being done covertly by a single rogue developer. It was unlikely that the Master was there invisibly in the room with them, but Martin had no intention of taking that risk. “I don’t want to talk about this in the game. You don’t know who might be listening.”

  With no other outlet for her frustration, Lindsay shoved him. “Dude, this is no time for your cryptic paranoid bullcrap, you went to meet him and he just didn’t show? You went to his house and the cops were there? What happened?”

  Even that sharp shock hadn’t been sufficient to knock Lindsay off course. So another dose of the truth was required. “He killed himself in front of me and I really don’t want to talk about it. Okay?”

  Lindsay fell back and sat down heavily on a fractured coil of stone snake body. “Dude.”

  He let out a shaky breath. Talking about it, even like this as a means to an end, meant acknowledging that it had really happened. He did not want to acknowledge that it had really happened. He did not want to access those memories again. That was a good way to fall into a downward spiral of disgust and despair. He almost reached up to his face to feel for the spray of blood before he caught himself and replied to Lindsay with a stilted, “Indeed.”

  “That’s really…” She darted forward and wrapped him in her wings. All of a sudden, his whole world was full of soft black feathers and warmth. “I’m so sorry you had to see that.”

  He let his head be drawn down to rest on her shoulder. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get any useful information out of him before he…”

  She rapped him on the top of his head with her knuckles. “Dude. Stop. This is just a game. What you saw, that’s real. That’s way too real.”

  He shuddered in her grip. “It doesn’t feel real yet.”

  “You might need therapy, or something. That’s the kind of stuff that will really mess you up, man.” She petted the fur on the back of his neck as if he was a dog. “Jeez, no wonder you’ve been so cagey and weird these last few days if you saw something like that. I can’t believe that the cops didn’t just hand you straight to the straightjacket brigade.”

  He shook his head. “No cops. I ran.”

  She drew back from him. “Dude, what?”

  “He told me… he told me a lot of really strange things about the game before he died.” Martin had gotten a lot better about meeting people’s eyes since he moved away from his parents, but he still struggled in moments like this. He stared off over Lindsay’s shoulder and hoped she wouldn’t make a big deal out of it. “He said things that made me think I couldn’t trust anyone. Not the police, not anyone.”

  She weaved to the side to get into his line of sight, to meet his stare. “You know you can trust me though, right?”

  He bowed his head until their foreheads touched, and th
en answered, softly, “Always.”

  “Bros for life?” He could feel the words rumbling up through her hollow bones, vibrating into his skull, into his brain, without any need for his ears.

  This time, his smile was as genuine as it got. “Bros for life.”

  They broke apart from their awkward embrace and Martin went back to looking around the room rather than acknowledging that anything had happened.

  Lindsay wasn’t quite as ready to let go, however. “You know you should really, properly take a break. I know you don’t have any family nearby, but is there anyone you could–”

  He hadn’t meant to snap, but there was definitely an edge to his voice when he said, “I don’t need anyone.”

  “I… okay. Yeah. Okay.” She gave him a pat on the shoulder. “If you want to talk, you know where I am, right?”

  He thawed a little. “When I’m ready, you’ll be the one that I talk to. You always are.”

  Now it was her turn to look uncomfortable. Martin used to think that she looked that way when he made a mistake in their social interactions, but he had gradually come to realize that Lindsay required affirmation of their relationship in the same way as everyone else, even if she was visibly uncomfortable with it. In her way, Lindsay was as much a mess as him. “Okay, cool. Just get a good night’s sleep, yeah? Busy day tomorrow. Rescuing Speckles and Jericho.”

  “Yeah. Good plan.” He smiled at her. “Oh, and Lindsay?”

  She opened her eyes just before she logged out. “Yeah?”

  His smile didn’t flicker. “If I catch you trying to die again when it isn’t your turn, we’re going to have a conversation.”

  “Ah.” Her eyes widened. “Spotted that, did you?”

  “Of all the things you know about me,” he said, his voice soft enough that he could see her leaning in closer to hear him, “what is the most important?”

  She sighed. “You’re the smartest rat in the room. I know. Sorry.”

  The tension that had been building up until now had become counterproductive. He needed to dispel it before they could move on to the next day’s efforts. “Not a problem. I really wanted to kick some cat tail anyway.”

  She cawed with laughter. “That’s more like it.”

  With a flash of light she was gone, and Martin was finally all alone in the dungeon. He let out a sigh of relief. It was a nightmarish hellscape full of monsters, but it was still so much easier to navigate than other people.

  Ten

  Fall of the Faithless

  Raking through the remains of the serpent statue, there were precious little pickings. A spear that required more strength than he had to wield and was clearly meant for a two-handing Knight. The deep key they had no use for if they went on following his plan to use his Rite of Passage exploit to open up the skip gates. A load of crafting material that he would never have time to train in the use of, and that some NPC vendor would trade for pocket-change at the next settlement. Some sort of veil for spellcasters made out of a diaphanous silky material that he was going to hand off to Julia whenever he got the opportunity. He had to shake the dust off before it blinked away into his inventory. He had vaguely hoped to find something for himself, but at least the spear would sell for enough real-life money to keep him afloat for a bit longer if the constant interruptions to his plans continued.

  Next, he closed his eye and leveled up.

  Skaife Murovan Exorcist

  Strength: 14 Agility: 10

  Endurance: 10 Willpower: 21

  Health: 54 Stamina: 64

  LEVEL 14

  You have 3 points to assign.

  If he intended on continuing to tank, then Endurance would be the obvious best solution, giving him enough health to feasibly survive some of the blows that enemies were dealing out. Alternately, Agility would give him the opportunity to avoid those blows. He’d definitely been stacking upgrades heavily into his damage-dealing stats while they had the proper party balance, because that was what had been required of him.

  It all came down to whether he expected Jericho to switch back to his usual class any time soon. The man had racked up a substantial Sin score, but every Dungeon-aligned enemy that they killed lowered it. It seemed almost inevitable that he’d be back to the Martyr class before too long, so adjusting his role at this point would just sink Martin back into his jack-of-all-trades obscurity. Games rewarded min-maxing stats, not an even spread.

  Increasingly, the abilities being offered up to Martin seemed to be leaning toward the mystical. That suggested that Willpower should be his damage stat of choice. The party’s lack of a dedicated arcane damage dealer reinforced that idea in Martin’s mind.

  Skaife Murovan Exorcist

  Strength: 14 Agility: 10

  Endurance: 10 Willpower: 24

  Health: 54 Stamina: 64

  LEVEL 14

  You may select 1 new ability.

  Affusion – Imbues an ally’s weapon with light. Transubstantiating 100% of physical damage to light damage for 15 seconds. [5-minute cooldown]

  Purify – Removes a curse effect from an ally. Touch range. [60-second cooldown]

  Cilice – Redirects all curses and blessings cast on allies in the next 30 seconds to the Exorcist. [30-second cooldown]

  Rite of Jubilation – Increases all experience gain within the 20ft area of effect by 50% for 30 seconds. [60-minute cooldown]

  One of the options had been lost from the last time he leveled up, filtered out due to his lack of interest so that new ones could be cycled in. He was going to have to bear that in mind. Anything he didn’t pick now he might lose out on. Jubilation was too good to risk losing. He selected it.

  He had let his mental map of the deep fade away. The others may not have believed that the place was being moved around, but he had seen more than enough evidence. He would have hoped that the kind of person who had dungeon building as their primary career skill might have had a little more imagination when it came to screwing over players, but at least the Master’s consistency could not be faulted.

  Picking a new direction and marking it as north in his mind, Martin set out into the tunnels. Normally, he would have been too worried about wandering monsters to risk such brazen exploration on his own, but the rules of this deep were different. The statues were easy to spot at a distance and didn’t activate until he was close enough to almost touch them. The only genuine threat to a lone adventurer in this deep would be the Night Ravager, and it seemed that Martin had no reason to fear it, beyond the toll the whispering took on his sanity every time he got too close.

  Slowly and methodically, Martin mapped out the dungeon, marking the walls as he went with little scratches from the tip of his sword so that he could tell if the layout had been interfered with. He found a half-dozen dead-end chambers with more immobile statues of animal-headed humans and backed off from them rapidly. He heard the whispers of the distant Heart in the deeps below, echoing up through the mouthpiece of the Night Ravager where it scurried around in the deep shadows at the edge of his perception.

  It was early enough when he set out roaming, and it had not even struck midnight when he was done in the northern half of the deep and headed south. There was no sign of interference. Whether this was some cunning ruse to make him believe that he had actually been losing his mind before or if the Master had finally given up, he couldn’t say for certain. Regardless, there could be no denying that Martin was plowing through the available real estate much faster than the whole guild had managed earlier on.

  Using the gate as his new hub for exploration, Martin barely paused for breath before he set out again. He was heading toward the Ravager now, but rather than meeting it head on, it seemed to be forever fading away. Moving back from Martin as he encroached deeper into its territory. If there were more Ravagers about, he could not hear the whispers through them, so he couldn’t shake the belief that there weren’t.

  Heading east more than south, the carvings on the walls soon became denser and dens
er, even spilling out onto the flagstones and the roof. Like they were bleeding out and corrupting the smooth stone with the invented history the Masters had concocted for this place.

  Martin plunged on deeper. They wouldn’t have put all this effort into it if it wasn’t leading to something. The friezes depicted epic battles now, clashes between the races of beast-people splayed over the backdrop of vaguely medieval looking fantasy landscapes. Not just the playable races but dozens, if not hundreds, of others.

  Bird people of myriad different types. Frog-men in plate armor, riding giant newts. Completely different from the mindless Anurvans they’d met in the swamps of Strata. His own people did not feature heavily, but there were glimpses of them here and there at the periphery of great battles, picking over the corpses alongside the Corvans. Preyed on in turn by Felidavan bandits. Every race that Martin had met in Strata was on display, and so many more. It was almost enough to distract him from his purpose. Almost.

  Until now, the Master’s attempts at shifting the layout of the dungeon had been, if not subtle, then at least somewhat restrained. All of that went out of the window. The tunnel beneath Martin’s feet suddenly jerked sideways and he fell face first into the graven images he’d been studying.

  [Skaife has suffered 3 environmental damage]

  The turbulence was not over. Martin was flung back and forth, up and down, battering from walls to floor to ceiling until he couldn’t say for sure which was which anymore.