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

by G. D. Penman

  The merchants they’d traded with. The class trainers. The food vendors. The beggars and the nobodies that were just there for flavor, all of them crammed into the circle, chasing after them.

  Up ahead, the front line tried to lock both arms and the haphazard shields they’d snatched up. Baskets and tools. Jericho smashed right into them, knocking the rank behind them off their feet with the force of the impact. The line held. The few of them that had a weapon to speak of started flailing at Jericho, and that familiar dark cloud of Vengeance gathered around him, even as his blood began to spatter down onto the metal street below.

  “Julia, cast!”

  Julia waved her hands, squeezing her eyes shut. Opening them again. “I… I can’t. None of my spells are working.”

  “Your class switched. You were a healer.” Martin kicked at a legless beggar as the Wulvan lunged out of an alleyway. “Now you’re a pure damage class. Blast them.”

  There were tears in her eyes again. “I don’t like…”

  Martin snapped. “I don’t care. Do it!”

  Shadows began to coil around her fingers and Martin turned back to the problem at hand.

  They were too organized. Much more organized than Martin would have expected a civilian encampment to be when enemies appeared right in the middle of their base. Somebody was rallying them. Wild eyed, up ahead of them was the settlement’s Exorcist, a Corvan with stark white feathers and shining golden armor. He was a beacon of light in the midst of the darkness Martin was creating. He was the problem.

  Lifting up his empty hand, Martin reached for Rebuke and found Summon in its place. He cast it, and the Corvan was torn from his feet, soaring over his front line to land on Martin’s blackened Creedblade.

  [Filandrous Snowfeather has suffered 10 dark damage]

  [Filandrous Snowfeather has suffered 10 piercing damage]

  Blood burst from the Exorcist’s beak. The Corvan’s eyes bulged. Then Snowfeather hefted his mace and it blazed with holy sunlight.

  Lindsay’s daggers bit through his neck in a flair of green light. It wasn’t blood that fell from the wound, but something foul, acrid and green. Where it hit the golden armor of the Exorcist it pitted it and stripped away the color. The wound peeled away from where the daggers had been, the edges puckering and feathers falling away in a cloud. Martin flung the man aside to bowl over a Sythvan knave that had been creeping up on them, but he had no time to see if the wounds were fatal. All that mattered was taking him out of the fight until they broke through.

  Jericho was gaining ground now, pushing the townsfolk back. Snapping his jaws at the faces of the ones who didn’t flee fast enough. The bites must have connected some time while Martin was distracted with the Exorcist, because blood already marred the Heretic’s dark muzzle.

  As always, Lindsay was doing her bloody work well. The swirl of a mad melee was the perfect place for her. Every moment of every day would be a fight just like this one if she had her way. She loved her job, and it showed in the passion she put into it. Not one villager got behind Jericho. Not even a part of one.

  The only real concern was Julia and the back line. She’d managed to loose a few balls of shadowy energy that were even now crackling and discharging damage to anyone near them, but now they’d been slowed she had stopped casting entirely. “This isn’t a tea party, Julia. They want us dead.”

  “I play healers for a reason! I hate this! I hate it!”

  Jericho unleashed his dark barrage attack with all the Vengeance he’d stored up during the push. Bolts of darkness burst out of his chest, ricocheting off the metal walls, melting tracks through the rivulets of wax and then blasting the townsfolk ahead of them apart. Without a leader, they broke and ran.

  Martin caught Julia by the back of her robes and pulled. The town poured around her little orbs of darkness now. Just as they poured in through the side streets behind Iron Riot as they beat a track to the nearest edge of the settlement.

  Jericho launched himself at the town wall, hoisted himself up then reached down for Lindsay. He yanked her into the air and she soared up and over the wall in a gentle arc. When Martin shoved Julia forward he did just the same, albeit much more gently.

  Martin was the last man out, but it was too late for him. The baying mob had been at their heels all the way through town and with only a rat-man left of the feared enemy they rushed forward with renewed vigor. Even as Martin reached for Jericho’s hand they were on him.

  [Skaife has suffered 7 bludgeoning damage]

  [Skaife has suffered 6 piercing damage]

  He pushed them back as best he could and was reaching for Jericho’s straining hand once more when the rest of the crowd plowed into him, grasping hands trying to drag him back. Drag him into the dirt. It wasn’t happening.

  He cried out to Jericho. “Look away!”

  Halo was gone, but in its place Eclipse blazed bright in Martin’s mind. He cast it, and a wave of darkness washed out from behind him and over the crowd. Their eyes turned not white by some blinding light, but inky black.

  The ones grappling Martin lost their hold as confusion set in, and he didn’t stop to see what this new power did but ran to Jericho, leapt up the wall and caught the giant of a Heretic by the wrist.

  “Goodbye, Deephaven!” Martin flipped the town off as he sailed over its wall, but the smirk was wiped from his face when he saw the hell he’d wrought.

  The villagers had turned on each other, hacking away at the flesh of their neighbors with their tools and their teeth. Blood-streaked fur and scales. Inky black bled from their eyes to patter on the ground. Anywhere else, this berserk rage would have been a danger to Martin and his party, but contained behind a wall it was a weapon of mass destruction beyond compare.

  He tucked and rolled as he hit the stone beyond the town, but still came up breathless. His only solace was that like Halo only lasted for a few seconds, the chaos within the town would end just as swiftly.

  When the crying started, he didn’t want to be anywhere near Deephaven. Catching up to Lindsay and Julia, they all ran for their lives toward the next deep.

  There were no monsters to be found wherever they looked, yet still Martin pressed on with a feverish energy. Giving Julia no time to stop and think about what she’d been forced to do. Giving himself no time to stop and think about what he’d been forced to do either, for that matter. If the NPCs back in that town had really been people once upon a time, then what had he just done?

  His tail trailed limp behind him. It had never been as dexterous as Julia’s, but the damage that had been dealt to it by the last Archduke left it almost entirely useless. He could strain a little to lift it off the ground, but any thought he’d ever had of using it in combat or for balance had to be put aside. At least it was still attached. Martin didn’t have enough limbs that he could spare even his least useful one.

  They dropped through into the Felidavan’s old ambush site and found it sorely lacking. While Julia and Lindsay crept forward nervously as they approached the spot where they’d last been defeated by the cat-folk, Jericho cast a broad grin over at Martin. “They were pussies, yes?”

  Martin laughed, and he barely even needed to force it.

  They proceeded through a few twisting, turning tunnels, then Lindsay stopped them with a thought. “Hey, who wants to go laugh at Dante in the hole?”

  Julia frowned. “You don’t think he fell for the same ambush twice?”

  “Dante?” Lindsay cawed. “He’d fall for the same trap three times in one day, are you kidding me?”

  “There are better players than Dante around him.” Martin shrugged. “I’m sure they were able to steer him around it, somehow.”

  Once again, Lindsay scoffed. “Uh, press x to doubt.”

  She paused for a moment. “I mean, there is a real easy way to find out…”

  Martin shook his head. “No, we need to press on.”

  “Boring. Milquetoast. Beige. Beige!” Lindsay’s rambling followed them t
hrough the length of the next deep too.

  Martin’s head was spinning with everything that had happened. All of his abilities were different. Even the abilities that he hadn’t unlocked yet. Leveling up wouldn’t help them, because there was no way to purge his Sin and switch back to an Exorcist and carry out his original plan to deal with the curse. If he somehow got Julia turned into a competent damage dealer, then maybe they could make an attempt at burning Phalanx down before it got off the three blasts to switch to cursing mode, but that was still working on the assumption that the blasts were the thing unlocking it and not the damage they’d dealt. The gamble was too great.

  When they arrived at the Skip Gate, the torch that Lindsay had been carrying lay dead at the base of the great stone pillar. Dead now. Habitually, Martin bent over to pick up after her. His fingers stopped an inch from the cool head of the torch. “Blessings.”

  Lindsay was at his side. “What? Did somebody sneeze?”

  “No. No, I’m thinking. Don’t stop me.” He snapped his fingers and pointed over at Julia. “Julia, you had blessings. Uh… Blessing of Ages, Winter’s Balm…”

  She counted them off on her fingers. “Embrace of Flame, Earthing Rod, Anointing Oil. They’re all gone. Useless. I can’t use any of them.”

  “You don’t lose anything when you change to your dark class. It just flips.” His buckteeth popped out as his grin spread. “The opposite of a blessing is a curse. Go see if they’re all curses now.”

  Lindsay was bouncing on the balls of her feet now, the excitement catching up to her. “What are you thinking? Curse Phalanx back? Give him some elemental weaknesses? Sap his health pool? Give him a funny moustache?”

  That was enough to derail Martin’s train of thought, at least for a moment. “Did Julia have a blessing to remove facial hair before?”

  Jericho scoffed. “Does not even have a razor in her apartment. I am all stubbles.”

  “They’re all there. All curses.” Julia opened her eyes. “What are you thinking?”

  Martin went on snapping his fingers as the cogs in his brain started spinning again. “Could you go and see which ones you could put on us that wouldn’t interfere in the fight. Nothing that drains our main stats, nothing that gives us weakness to physical or light damage.”

  “I uh, sure…” She paused before closing her eyes. “I’m cursing us?”

  “If you’ve got three or more of them, you’re damn right you’re cursing us.” Martin rubbed his ratty little paws together while Julia counted on her fingers.

  When she hit three, he clapped his hands together, startling her out of the menu. “We are back in business!”

  Jericho hated to feel like he was missing out on something, and his furry brows were drawing down, a snarl starting to form. “There’s no way you could know unless you’d had the worst luck ever.” Martin was practically dancing with excitement. “Strata only lets three curses stack on you. I got hit with about six of them in the snake-lady fight, but only three stuck. There’s no way anyone who hadn’t been in that exact crappy situation could have known about it.”

  Jericho’s frown became a grin. “Failing forward?”

  Lindsay nudged the big man with an elbow. “The Riot doesn’t have a reverse gear!”

  Martin took ahold of Julia’s waving hands and pressed them together. “You don’t need to deal damage. You don’t need to fight. All you have to do is keep these ‘buffs’ up on all of us through the battle and stay out of harm’s way. Can you do that for us?”

  “I… I can do that.” Now that the problem was recontextualized into her usual mindset, there would be no problem. The panic that had left her quaking and lashing her tail since they left Deephaven vanished in an instant.

  “Okay, okay, so with the timer out of the equation, all we have to worry about is dealing damage, avoiding the hand-feet-limbs, avoiding the floppy flail attacks and avoiding the beam attacks until phase two.” They all looked at him incredulously. “Come on, guys, we’ve dealt with way more complex fights before. Added bonus, it kind of looked like it does nothing during the curse, so it could be free damage time.”

  “The echoes.” Julia shuddered just talking about them. “What do we do about…?”

  “Nothing. You ignore whatever it is saying. They’ve clearly just recorded bits and pieces of conversations from inside the dungeon to be replayed. There is no logic to it, and there is no context to it either. If you were to listen to snippets of any conversation like that it would sound bad. Hell, if you were to listen to some of the weird noises that Lindsay makes on a daily basis out of context you’d think she was some kind of nymphomaniac psychopath.”

  Lindsay cocked her said to the side. “I mean, I’m not not–”

  Martin clapped his hands to interrupt her again. “Alright. Do whatever prep you need to now. Five minutes, then we’re heading in.”

  “But mooom, I want to go spank the meaty shaft noooow.” Lindsay moaned.

  “I need to level up. And you need to get your mind out of the gutter.”

  “But it is so fun down here. There’s porn of everything. Everything!”

  Closing his eye and covering his ears before she started singing about the true purpose of the internet, Martin turned to the menus inside him.

  Skaife Murovan Shadow Templar

  Strength: 14 Agility: 10

  Endurance: 10 Willpower: 24

  Health: 54 Stamina: 64

  LEVEL 15

  You have 3 points to assign.

  Burning down the Archduke as fast as possible would suggest that Strength or Willpower were the correct choice, but Martin had already committed to their curse-resistance plan. Which meant that survivability was the key thing. In particular, navigating the area-of-effect damage that Phalanx unleashed with its mask beams.

  Skaife Murovan Shadow Templar

  Strength: 14 Agility: 13

  Endurance: 10 Willpower: 24

  Health: 54 Stamina: 64

  LEVEL 15

  Counterbalancing his lack of stature when it came to running also factored into the decision, giving this choice some utility in the long term as well as the immediate benefits.

  You may select 1 new ability.

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

  Agrapha – Refresh an existing curse or poison effect on a target. Touch range. [30-second cooldown]

  Dulia – Restores health equal to damage dealt for 3 seconds. [60-second cooldown]

  They had no healing options available at the moment, so Martin committed to Dulia immediately. He’d been expecting some sort of vampiric ability ever since he saw how Jericho’s Heretic strengths worked. It would serve well if he did happen to get clipped by Phalanx.

  Without Rebuke they had to climb the pillar the old-fashioned way, but Martin had no struggle with that now that his stamina had restored to normal. They passed through the gate painlessly without a rope tangling up the workings of the magic portal and landed in the pale cavern below in absolute silence.

  Knowing what was waiting for them, there was no tangle of limbs this time around. They went through one by one, landed on their feet and shuffled aside. Deploying like paratroopers into enemy territory.

  With just a gesture, Martin led them forward to the open mouth of the Archduke’s chambers. Speckles lay there on his face, and Lindsay had to drop down and turn him over to confirm that he was alive. At once, his throat puffed up and he opened his mouth to speak, but all of them leapt down to muffle him before a sound could come out. Martin scrambled up in front of the frog-man’s face and pressed a finger to his own lips until Speckles nodded his agreement.

  There was a bad burn covering most of Speckles’ torso, but Martin had no healing abilities in his current form. With a shared nod, he and Jericho took a hold of the Anurvan under his arms and dragged him back into the tunnel where he’d be safe in the ensuing battle. Lindsay
pressed her beak close to the side of the frog-man’s face, whispering so softly that even Martin couldn’t hear her.

  She’d be making promises that they’d come back and heal him once the boss was dead. The very same words Martin would have said himself. But while he would have been saying them to keep him quiet, Lindsay was saying them to provide the little frog-man with some measure of comfort. Whether she knew it or not, she was treating the NPCs in this game like they were people.

  It was the kind of silly affectation that she’d adopted in countless other games. He’d heard her naming her guns the few times they’d tried a first-person shooter together. The only difference was that, in this world, the more that she treated the NPCs like real people, the more they acted like them. It was impossible to look at Speckles now and see him as some stack of code. He thought. He felt. He was as human as the rest of them, and probably slightly more human than Martin at this point. Just because it made no sense, that didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

  When this fight was done and they had a little downtime, Martin was going to tell them everything. Julia and Jericho would worry and sneer, Lindsay would do whatever it was that Lindsay did, but at least they’d look at the same evidence he was seeing and come to conclusions of their own instead of blithely walking by it. That more than anything else had been fueling Martin’s sense that he was going mad. Iron Riot was his whole world, his family. He needed them to see it too.

  Silently, he gestured to the rest of the guild and they crept through the big white baby mouth into the next chamber, spreading silently and slowly around to encircle the immobile mass of flesh at the center.

  “That isn’t how Iron Riot plays. Iron Riot plays. Iron Riot plays.” Julia’s voice rumbled down over them from the masks, setting all the fur on the back of Martin’s neck prickling. So they weren’t sneaking in undetected. Good to know.