by K. T. Hanna
He’d wanted to warn her, but he couldn’t keep doing that. There was only so much he could interfere with before doing it too much.
“You know you could have just talked to me, don’t you?” Emilarth stood next to him, without a warning, and startled the crap out of him.
Telvar frowned. How had she done that? Plucking thoughts out of heads was something they did to gamers, not to each other, especially considering they didn’t technically possess heads, yet.
“Don’t be stupid. You’re taking on that distinctly human trait of showing expressions on your face. You might be lacerta, but I can still see concern on your face when you show it, so stop wondering how I invaded your programming.” Emilarth’s tone held irritated boredom.
“Okay, then. Tell me what I’m worried about,” he snapped, not wanting his brooding to be interrupted.
She laughed, but it didn’t sound like she meant it, more sarcastic in nature. “Murmur. Because that’s so hard to guess.”
Which, logically, shouldn’t have irritated him. Telvar was fully aware of how much he thought about her and watched her. Of how much he was invested in making sure they didn’t make the deaths hit a trifecta. Of how much he’d become invested in her.
“Don’t rub it in.” He closed his eyes, not that it was necessary for him to do in order to access his subroutines. “They’re in another one of your dungeons. Take care of her. That same shit better not happen again.”
“No need to warn me about it. I’ve been keeping far better tabs on Arita since she gave Murmur the leech stone. But what I ultimately need to know is why your pet enchanter doesn’t always come up as a player?” Emilarth’s tone was even and cool, like she’d been aiming for the sucker punch of her words to smack into him.
A very human reaction.
Were they all just being taken over by something larger than them? Something that Telvar had yet to witness, to factor into his calculations? The thought had merit, even if it had no logical basis to conclude from.
“Tel? Don’t ignore me when I ask you important shit.” Emilarth was losing patience.
“As opposed to just ignoring you generally.” Telvar ducked as Emilarth glared at him, just in case she decided to punch him for being a smart ass. “I’m not ignoring you, I was running through some calculations trying to figure something out. As long as she’s safe in that castle, we’ll be fine.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“Ah, I’d hoped you’d forgotten about that.” Telvar ran his sister’s words through his head, mulling them over. “The world seems fond of her. Sometimes I think the system forgets she’s not just another extension of it. With the way her thoughts and actions are intertwined with Somnia, sometimes I feel like she forgets it too. While I haven’t had a chance to talk to her yet about how her abilities have melded into the world since they were thrown into that limbo, I am quite certain it pulled them in there to protect Murmur, and thereby exposed itself to the others as well.”
“It? You’re talking about the world, this world that we created, the one we’re in control of?” She raised an eyebrow, but her gaze grew distant as she accessed some internal elements.
He’d wait for her to hit the realization too. After all, they had time—if nothing else.
“Wait. What?” She started, her eyes darting to his with an incredulous look. “It’s working then? This doesn’t make sense?”
Her frown deepened and something akin to panic washed over her features. Telvar felt a pang of pity for her. “They won’t be affected in the same way; the headsets they have won’t allow for it, but I’m pretty sure one of the failsafes has been eliminated.”
Emilarth balked again, and then shook her head as if trying to shake out unwanted thoughts. “Okay, then. Let’s be rational about this. How?”
Telvar shook his head, unsure how to answer her, and decided to go with the truth. “I’m not entirely sure, but I think somewhere around when the glitches went into overdrive and flung everyone out of the server. When Riasli disturbed the status quo of the game world and the ruins. It reacted out of self-preservation or something. It reacted to cocoon Murmur so to speak, making sure she wasn’t affected negatively. In doing so, it pulled all of the group in because otherwise it could have been disastrous.”
“Does she know yet?” Thra whispered, her gaze darting to and from Hiro and Telvar, like she didn’t trust Telvar’s right hand man. She didn’t exactly know if he was an extension of Telvar or of something else. Perhaps an arm of the world, like Murmur seemed to be.
“She doesn’t, but I do know she’s realizing something. There’s no way she can’t. With all the mind enhancements this connection has given her, including the ones she’s unlocked on her own, there’s no way she can avoid some form of realization. Slowly.” He inclined his head and looked out across the island once more.
“Of course, I’m not sure what she’ll do with the information once everything clicks. But I’m glad I’ve stayed on her good side.”
He chuckled to himself, hoping against hope that Murmur wouldn’t just try to sever the connection, because that was the only thing he really worried about. Severing her connection wouldn’t only have dire consequences for herself, but with the way things were developing, for Somnia and everyone in it as well.
Whatever Arita had done to her domain, it made fighting the monsters throughout the halls about thirty times more difficult than it had been the first time they visited.
The gargoyle they were fighting moved like liquid stone, so fluid in its movements it was sometimes difficult to track. Bat-like wings sprouted from its back and it flitted here and there, difficult to hold down with no apparent agro table. Murmur could see the irritation sprouting in Devlish while he attempted to get it to focus on him. But it was no good. These guys hurt, too, and without a threat meter to speak of, the healers were hard pressed to keep everyone’s health up enough that the damage wasn’t a threat.
“We’re going to have to stun these guys.” Murmur spoke, momentarily forgetting how not possible it was to stun a damned rock. She sighed. “Forget I said that.”
“If we get anymore incoming, we’re going to have to root them all. Merlin you can take the first one, Exbo—you take the second, and I’ll take a third if there is one.” Multiple of these rock bat-gargoyles weren’t going to make fighting through here as a group fun.
“Just need to pull one at a time to make it easier, right?” Devlish spoke out, the annoyance in his tone loud enough to make one of their targets attack him briefly. “Maybe they understand us. If I insult them verbally, does that mean they’ll focus on me?”
Mellow laughed. “You can try it if you like, but this one is almost dead anyway. Don’t worry about mechanics we can’t change. We just need to adapt.”
Which was the whole story of Somnia, really, Murmur mused to herself. Adapting to playing a class you might not otherwise, adapting to a world that changed with you, grew stronger as you defeated it, and kept its people safe in the event of a shutdown.
Maintaining her shield over their little raid group was negligible. Sure, it made eighty-eight MA disappear, and along with Snowy’s permanent thirty-five while he was with them, one hundred twenty-three MA was nothing to scoff at. But she had another one hundred seventy-two to spare, so unless something dire happened, she had all of her abilities available to her, even with constantly protecting her raid.
“Incoming.” Rash yelled, and enabled Feign Corpse right in front of Murmur’s eyes. The visual on that would never cease to startle her. But this way they only had two mobs incoming instead of a whole row. Murmur grabbed the back one in her sights and cast Mez on it, thankful that it wasn’t another stone beast, and instead some sort of languishing zombie with flesh half hanging from its skeleton, largely still kept in place by the ragged clothing it appeared to be wearing.
“This first corridor is p
roving to be a bit of a test.” Sin grunted as she pulled yet another thread of blood from one of the incoming constructs. Those at least weren’t stone, which provided her with some relief that Murmur could see.
The constructs appeared to be compiled out of various leftovers of animals and well... beings. Bones protruded from them, and every time they moved there was a sickening squelch of pieces smashing together within it that didn’t exactly belong there. Blood dripped onto the floor when they walked whether there was a wound or not, and tendrils of black magic wound their way around the entire body, holding it together in a way that required dispells, spell stripping, and overriding spell effects instead of pure hack and slash.
Each time they attempted to fight it with pure force, it only regenerated its bits constantly—with such speed Murmur didn’t even want to contemplate where the pieces were coming from to construct this thing. It was grotesque, but also entirely something she’d expect from a dark elf vampire’s castle.
Kudos had to go to Arita for maintaining the right aura within.
Add to that the fact that ceilings appeared to have been raised and were less confining, this entire grand castle effect worked. Murmur only wished the monsters they were facing weren’t so visual.
“Mur, I can’t tank most of these things.” Devlish forced the words out as he parried one of the construct’s attacks. “Their threat changes too frequently, it’s all I can do to maintain it semi-regularly.”
Murmur nodded, having already noticed the way their attention flitted around to group members. It wasn’t normal, but then how could she have thought it would be? “We got this.”
The constructs might have been difficult to whittle down, but at the same time at least they were Mez-able. Maintaining her Mez was relatively easy, and it gave her time to assess the situation.
Havoc meanwhile, appeared gleeful. Undead were his specialty, and while the stone gargoyles didn’t fall under his domain, the constructs definitely did. It was a godsend they had him and those abilities, because he was the one picking the spell that held them together apart. Concentration made his brows pinch, but his whole aura shone with achievement when he finally looked up.
“Got it. Think I have a way to make these ones a bit quicker next time.”
He grinned over at Devlish and motioned with his left arm. The action sent Leeroy over to swing the scythe at a specific spot in the middle of the construct’s chest. The tip of it pulled at very obvious strings of dark power at first, tugging, until the blade managed to cut through the knot it held there.
The result was almost instantaneous.
Blood and viscera splattered open in a huge frontal arc as the bands snapped. It showered not only Devlish, but Jinna, Beastial, and Rashlyn in the gloopy mess. Sinister began to gag next to them, even though she’d barely received a sprinkle of guts on her.
Murmur choked back a laugh at Havoc’s evilly triumphant facial expression.
“Bastard. Totally uncalled for. Could so have warned us.” Sinister glared at him, trying her best to fight the gag reflex. She grit her teeth and turned away from him. “You can bloody well heal yourself for a while.”
Veranol shrugged his shoulders. “Can’t go against that, mate. You know how she got way back with the Brute. This was a little stupid.”
Havoc laughed. “It’s okay. I’ll make sure I don’t die. I can suck enough life out of these things to regenerate my health a bit.”
Sinister didn’t even respond, just turned with Devlish to the zombie-type creature they were about to break out of Mez. Rashlyn would head out halfway through the killing to fetch another few. This way pulling the monsters went fluidly with little to no down time. Perfect, really.
Murmur sighed with relief as she noticed that Devlish’s taunts were working on this monster. Havoc still appeared to be excited at using his undead powers, and the rest of them were beginning to settle into a long haul of fighting.
She wished she knew how much trash was out there, how much shit they’d have to fight through. Either way she had a sneaking suspicion that this time around the castle wasn’t just going to lead them straight to Arita. No, last time they’d been ushered to her, probably because they weren’t nearly high level enough to actually challenge her.
This time they were. Her level would adjust to whatever they averaged. And with Murmur inching closer to level thirty-five, they were only going to get stronger.
She had no doubt there would be other bosses along the way this time, and the halls were already leading in a different path to where the throne room had been last time. Which meant that either they’d totally redone the castle—which she didn’t think was the case—or else, Arita meant to put them through everything the castle had to offer before she allowed them to reach her.
Murmur lost count of the enemies they’d downed, but she’d crossed over into level thirty-five and had to say it wasn’t worth the blood drenching her robes.
The spray of blood had been impossible to avoid, and while healing might make garments whole again, and she really needed to speak to Telvar about that. It didn’t make them clean.
By the time they reached the double doors at the end of one of the halls they’d taken, the stench was beginning to seriously aggravate Murmur’s senses. Last time they’d been unable to rid themselves of the sticky smell without jumping into the lake outside their island castle.
“Anyone else think we’re walking into a world of hurt in there?” Jinna asked, reaching up a hand to wipe his face when he realized it too was covered in blood and let it drop to his side again.
“Definitely.” Mellow mumbled the words, their eyes unfocused as they ran through something in their HUD.
“Got something in there to clean all this crap off us?” Sinister asked, the hope in her voice almost painful to hear. She didn’t seem to deal well with bodily fluids when they weren’t in the body.
Murmur contemplated squeezing her shoulder, but decided against it since the squelching noise would probably make the blood mage gag. Ironic in itself really considering she used blood in her spell casting all the time, but Murmur wasn’t about to point it out to her friend. Better to just leave well enough alone since they all needed to be functional.
“Maybe. It’ll require us to squeeze together and basically be drenched.” Mellow looked up and grinned. “Which I know is what you were all hoping to hear. That being said, I do want to get this stuff off, because the stink of it is distracting me from concentration. And if there’s a boss in there like I assume there’s going to be, I’m going to need all of my wits about me.”
“Ditto.” Devlish glanced at the cauldron with an eyebrow raised, as if he expected it to cough forth whatever sort of stuff it did immediately.
“A watched floating cauldron never spits out its ingredients.” Mellow said as they concentrated on fetching whatever ingredients it was they needed to form this spell. They looked up and focused on everyone else. “This is a cleansing. It does say it washes away both detrimental visual and magical effects, so I’m really hoping it works. It’s meant for a small five foot radius. But I think if we all stand together, we should be pretty good.”
Murmur had never seen her friends huddle so quickly before. She grinned, running through her inventory and getting ready to pull out of a few of her spells.
A warm, rainy drizzle descended upon them. Almost like a mist with fingers that wound its way completely through all of them. It tickled and tingled, but there was no pain, only a vague sense of cleanliness as it passed over each of them. The smell began to dissipate, leaving a hint of wildflower-esque freshness behind them as well as a sense of overall calm.
“Wow.” Sinister smiled widely and turned to bear hug Mellow. “Thank you. I was so close to being sick.”
Mellow just smiled. “I wasn’t sure it would work, and one of the ingredients is rather obscure, but overall, here we are.�
�
“Hey!” Havoc called out. “It’s left a buff of sorts on us for the next thirty minutes.”
Buff: This ward doesn’t prevent or absorb damage, but instead keeps you free from harmful effect for the remainder of its duration. This does not extend to pure damage spells, only to the negative effects they might apply.
Murmur blinked as she read over the tooltip. Damn it, that was nice.
“What’s the obscure ingredient? How rare is it, and who do I need to send to farm it?” Murmur asked the questions earnestly.
“I can only create this once every forty-five minutes, but I need a kobold horn. Considering we’d fought a lot of them, and I didn’t remember ever coming across them, I was surprised to find seventeen of them in the guild bank. It’s just a rare drop that is often sold to vendors. Let them know not to sell them, I guess.” Mellow looked thoughtful, as if they hadn’t considered secondary benefits to their abilities before now.
Beastial announced it to the guild a split second after Mellow finished explaining the situation.
Beastial: Keep an eye out for kobold horns. They’re needed for raiding.
Stockpiling horns became the next trend for their guild just like that. Murmur grinned, but wished she knew exactly how this all worked. “I have to memorize my spells and abilities.”
“You leveled, Mur!” Sinister gave her a quick, now beautifully-smelling hug which Murmur gladly returned. “We’ll be right behind you. Sort of.”
Mur cringed nodded, not wanting to spoil her friend’s enthusiasm and sat down to check out her spells. She hadn’t opened them at all since buying them from Belius when she thought it better to get them off him in advance. After Riasli, she wasn’t quite prepared to trust any of the NPCs as far as she could throw them. Even if she knew Belius was shady in his own way, he’d often showed he cared about her in that gruff, grumpy old man sort of way.
Unrolling her first few scrolls, she saw basic upgrades to her abilities, including a gorgeous upgrade to her Mana Tide. More mana was always better, especially with as intensive as some of these fights had been getting lately. Together with her ring, hopefully her own mana woes would be solved.
