I lunged for him with the spear blade, and he dodged once, twice, and then spun into my guard. I headbutted him. The mask fell off, but all I saw of his face was a silver flash as he grabbed me, spun around, and threw me over the railing like I weighed nothing.
I caught his clothing as I went over the edge, and pulled him down with me.
“Hector!” Karalti screeched and dove for us, catching my hair and belt and flapping to slow our descent, but the murderer must have been built out of lead bricks, because he weighed a ton. Karalti almost fell with us, but she helped me orient in the air - when we slammed into the enclosed courtyard beneath the tower, I was on top.
[You have taken 84 points of impact damage!]
I grunted with pain as the impact bounced me like a basketball, but managed to avoid sticking myself with my own weapon as I tumbled over the ground and flipped up to my feet to confront the Slayer as he climbed up from the broken paving stones. He staggered briefly, hunched and limping, but turned to stare me down.
The Mercurion’s face was not that of a vicious psychopath. He was angelically handsome, his delicate countenance twisted up into a mask of fear and desperation. His eyes burned blue, mana spiraling in around white pupils. Silver hair clung to his face and stuck up strangely around the winglets that curved back from in front of his ears. The cuts and tears on his silvery skin were leaking glowing white mana, not blood. I had just enough time to notice that before he bared his glassy teeth and threw something at Karalti.
Karalti, while agile for a creature of her size, could not get out of the way in time. The gas-spewing device struck her, but she swatted it back toward us with a squawk of alarm. The smoke that billowed from it swept over me with the wind.
[Warning! High concentrations of mana in the area may cause Stranging in nearby NPCs!]
[You resist the dispersed mana!]
For a breathless moment, I waited. Nothing happened, and the Mercurion’s eyes widened.
“Tarn takhrar, motherfucker!” I triggered Bluster, regaining a few Adrenaline Points and some HP, and spun at him through the smoke with Blood Sprint, dark energy crackling down the length of the spear and into his body. The strike smashed into him, and the Blood Storm combo chain blew him off his feet.
[You hit Mercurion Assassin for 228 Damage!]
[You inflict Bleeding!]
The man backflipped midair, righting himself, and managed to land in a crouch.
“KIAHH!” I slammed the spear down along the ground. The energy gathered from Blood Storm burst out through the Umbra Blast maneuver. It tore the cobblestones and knocked the Mercurion off his feet a second time. This time, he couldn’t get up. He was visibly panicked now; his crossbow was out of bolts, and the mana flare he’d pitched at us was obviously some kind of last resort. I Jumped forward and pushed the end of the Spear up beneath his jaw, pinning his head to the ground.
“Mercy,” he croaked. “You don’t understand.”
“I understand that you’re a sick fuck who just tried to mutate us,” I snapped.
Karalti was rolling on the flare like a cat with catnip. The white gas turned dark on contact with her scales, like thunderclouds charged with violet lightning, then was absorbed into her body. “Funny gas!”
The Mercurion reached up to push the Spear away, but I dug it in until his fingers slipped away and a thin trickle of mana ran along his jawline. I glared down at him. “You. You’ve got five seconds to tell me who hell you are before I cut your head off and take it to the Volod on a platter.”
His eyes narrowed. The magic in them roiled like lava, folding into the white pupil and then blooming out again.
“Three seconds, psycho.” I drew on the Mark of Matir and sent a flash of dark energy down the length of the weapon. The Mercurion cried out, writhing in pain.
“There are… things worth dying for…” he gasped. “What I am doing is… for one of them.”
“Alright. Suit yourself.” I put pressure down on the blade to cut his throat.
“HECTOR!” Karalti shrilled from behind me.
I sensed the disturbance before I saw it: a puff of air, a cold shadow swimming overhead. I spun away just as something crashed down where I had been standing only a second before. It was a brass-and-steel automaton: a crab-like turret the size of a pit bull. It had four spiked legs, and a body that was little more than a platform for a repeating crossbow.
It fired bolts in a strafing line, chasing me away from the prone assassin. I Shadow Danced away with a snarl of frustration, reappearing as the Slayer, wide-eyed with terror, scrambled to his feet. Karalti spat a gout of fire that incinerated a crossbow bolt, flapping back up into the air as a second dog-sized artifact bounded into view. This one shot wildly at the pair of us as it approached. I took two hits: one to the arm, one to the calf. Their metal bodies were almost entirely soundless, save for the sharp *tang* of their feet as they stamped the ground.
Karalti’s fire splashed the newcomer and sent it tilting away with a crown of flames, while the other backed off. The Mercurion! I searched around wildly, and saw him jump from a pipe to a windowsill to a roof and then vanish behind a chimney. Furious, I chugged a Brightlace potion, recovering 75 HP, and started running.
Another shadow figure, the one I hadn’t seen, peeled away from behind a pillar and tackled me to the ground. I hit hard, brought down by the desperate bear hug of what felt like a stack of bricks. I cursed as we wrestled there in the dark. My attacker crawled away, shielding their face with their hands, and rolled onto their back as I clambered to my feet and leveled the Spear at them.
It was a girl. Another Mercurion.
“Please,” she said. Her voice was high and breathy, her eyes wide with terror. “W-wait, please. Don’t kill me!”
Nostrils flaring, I took a step away from her. This Mercurion was, in a word, adorable. Big eyes, an open, expressive face, a bob of translucent glassy hair, an up-tilted nose and a slim, girlish body. Like all of her race, she was unearthly. She was also flagged as a player character, with a strange-looking HUD ring: her blue corona had a gold ring around the edge.
She put her shaking hands up in the universal gesture of surrender, and didn’t try to rise off the ground.
“Get up.” Breathing hard, I took another step back. The Mark of Matir sent spikes of ice through my blood, charged with power just waiting to be released. “And call those death machines off my dragon, or I’ll kill you.”
Slowly, the girl picked herself up. “T-Their names are L-Lovelace and Hopper. Not ‘D-Death Machines’.”
“You don’t say.” I reached up, twisted the bolt buried in my arm, and pulled it out. With the combat rush pounding through my body, it didn’t hurt as much as it should have. Even so, the pain replenished some Adrenaline Points. I threw the bloody bolt at her feet, and she flinched back, covering her face.
When she cowered, I hesitated - but not for more than a second. This girl screamed ‘honeypot’, from her ankle-length scarf to her cute little short-shorts and her wide-topped boots. She had spell gloves on both hands, which meant she could do magic.
“That man you just let go? I caught him murdering an NPC.” I whirled my spear around into a combat position and stomped a foot down to center myself. The maneuver recharged some more AP, and distracted her from my dragon. Karalti was slowly flanking the girl. She vanished into the shadows, while the pair of automatons skittered back and forth uneasily hanging back to either side of me. “And YOU just stopped me from bringing him to justice.”
The Mercurion girl shook her hands, and when she spoke, her voice was shaky with fear. “Please... he’s not like this. He’s an artist, a Master A-A-Artificer. He-he-he wouldn’t n-normally do this! I-I...”
“Call. Your. Fucking. Robots. Off.” I wasn’t buying the ‘panicky little kid’ act.
The girl’s hands shook as she held them out, and gestured. The mana in her gloves flared, and the two artifacts obediently scuttled around to their mistress. They fell in to
either side of her.
As I tracked their movements, I saw a small flash on the ground where I’d just about dropped the male Mercurion: a pendant with a broken chain.
“Hold steady,” I ordered Karalti. “Stay hidden. And if she tries to cast anything, blast her.”
“Oki.”
“He’s going to murder other people now. You know that, right?” I said aloud, moving slowly toward the necklace. “He’s already killed three others. Don’t you care about those NPCs?”
“Of course I care!” The girl shook her head, her hair flying out. “I’m trying to say that Kanzo wouldn’t normally do this. He w-wouldn’t-”
“Except that he would. He did. I literally caught him skinning a man in his actual goddamned office.” I gestured angrily in the direction of the hospital.
“I mean that someone’s making him kill these people!” There was finally some heat in her voice, and she advanced half a step. “He’s not doing this willingly, alright?!”
“And how do you know that?” I demanded. I covered the necklace with my boot.
“Because I’m his apprentice,” the girl said, fingers quaking beside her cheeks. “My name’s Rin. And I’m a Developer.”
Chapter 11
“A Dev?” I didn’t drop the Spear point. “Guess that explains the gold ring.”
Rin pressed her lips together in a thin line and nodded, glancing nervously at the blood leaking down my arm. “This doesn’t look very good, does it?”
“No, it really doesn’t.”
“I’m sorry... but I have a quest too.” The girl looked away from me, clutching her arm with the other hand. “I have to find out what happened to make Kanzo do these awful things, and then try to stop it and save him.”
“Save him? What are you, a Jehovah’s Witness or something? The guy’s a serial killer.” I was increasingly unimpressed. “It doesn’t matter how much you like him - he needs a dose of the King’s justice. Besides, you’re a Dev, an Architect. You’re a god above gods in this game. Why the fuck are you intervening in player quests?”
“Because I am a player,” she replied, exasperated. “I worked on the game, and I was supposed to become a Mod, but then Aurora Shard was blown up and the servers reset from the orbital backups... Now I’m just a player until someone from the outside reinstates functioning Mod and Admin tiers.”
I blinked. “There are no Mods in Archemi right now?”
“No. And there won’t be until we re-establish outside contact. OUROS can moderate the game using ASE,” she replied.
“ASE being…?”
“Oh! It stands for Administration and Social Exchange. It’s one of the OUROS slave AIs that regulates NPC and player interaction.” The physical signs of fear began to fade as her speech sped up, flat and a little fussy. “When the game rebooted from SOPHIA-1 and 2, all of the human-controlled Mod accounts were disabled as a safety feature to protect the refugees, because the human element is statistically less predictable than the OURO’s ADEE and the ACE Engines. The risk of cyber psychosis goes up exponentially with externally imposed stressors like, um, global nuclear apocalypse, and… well, any apocalypse, really…”
“Cyber psychosis?” I blinked again.
The Mercurion blushed a bright silvery blue. “... I was babbling again, wasn’t I?”
“You seem to know your shit,” I replied cautiously. Her robot buddies still hadn’t moved. “Don’t suppose you knew a guy named Steven Park?”
Rin brightened a little. “Of course I knew Steven. Why?”
“He was my brother.”
She gasped. “Really!? Oh my gosh! I didn’t work in his department, but I, umm, I was part of the Environmental Design Team before I got HEX. He was one of the Core Devs who worked on OUROS. I was just a psycho-social advisor and architectural modeler mostly, but he was one of my nerd heroes, umm…”
Rin trailed off shyly, not quite able to meet my eyes.
I sighed, and dropped the spear point at last. This was like trying to hold a puppy at knifepoint. Rin was clearly not a combatant, despite the crossbow-wielding deathbots.
“Keep talking.” I crouched down, and mimed adjusting my boot while I palmed the broken necklace that I’d been trying not to grind against the pavement. “Why are you in Taltos? Place seems kind of racist against anything that isn’t human.”
“I was one of the artists who created Taltos. We based it on old Bohemia, and I worked on, umm, modelling the buildings and base materials and logistics for the region, so when I crossed over, I wanted to settle here and become a crafter. Kanzo is my bonded NPC.”
I squinted in confusion. “Your what?”
“Oh. It’s a crafter thing.” Rin fidgeted in a way that was oddly familiar to me. Fingers pattering, unable to meet my eyes for long periods, social awkwardness… hmm.
“Meaning?”
Rin twisted the edge of her scarf in her fingers. “When you make a character, you choose between combat and non-combat roles. If you don’t take a combat role, you don’t get the same paths or the same kinds of adventures as combat characters... and you get a bonded NPC who starts you off in your chosen profession. If you’re a farmer, they might be like, your adopted dad or sister or something. If you’re in the sciences or crafting, they’re usually your craftmaster. I’m an craft-specialized Artificer, so…”
“So you got Kanzo.” I sighed, and relaxed my guard. “Come out, Karalti. Stay chill.”
Karalti stalked out of the shadows. Rin nearly jumped out of her skin as the dragon padded over to my side, her head held erect and stiff, tail lashing. While Rin was distracted, I slipped the necklace into a pocket. As I eased down out of combat readiness, I got new updates:
Quest Update: The Slayer of Taltos
After catching the Slayer of Taltos in the act of murdering a priest of Khors, you have discovered his identity: a Mercurion by the name of Kanzo who is a renowned Artificer – and a pacifist exile from Zaunt, the war-torn Mercurion homeland. You would have gotten him, too, if not for those meddling kids.
You have also collected your first piece of evidence for the Volod.
Reward: 502 EXP, Mysterious Necklace [Quest Item], 20 gold Olbia.
As the EXP added, Karalti got an odd expression on her face. The seams of color between her scales glowed brightly. They licked out across her skin, obscuring her in a glowing swirl. She underwent metamorphosis rapidly, and when the colors retreated, she had nearly doubled in size once again.
“Oopsie.” Karalti still had a skinny hatchling look about her, but when she reared her head back, it easily came up to my collarbones. Her round horn stubs now had tiny, sharp, polished tips.
“Oh my goodness!” Rin exclaimed, her fingers fluttering up to her mouth. “She’s beautiful. I... umm... didn’t even see her before...”
Karalti narrowed her eyes, and huffed a spurt of white fire from her nostrils onto the ground. Rin jumped back about four feet. “Weird rubber lady hurt you?”
“Not badly,” I thought back to her.
The dragon flicked her wings along her ribs, pawing at the ground and weaving her head like a snake. “I don’t trust her.”
“I’ve never seen a dragon in the game before!” Rin squeaked. “Did she just level?”
“Yeah, she did. And she’s not too sure about you, which means that neither am I.” Frustrated, I checked Karalti for damage. She was missing about fifteen HP, so I took a Bonebreak Poultice from my Inventory and applied it to her wound. “Look, I have to go report to the Volod about what I saw. You need to come too.”
Rin shook her head vigorously, stepping back. “I can’t.”
“Why?” My tone sharpened again. “Your master’s going to kill again. The King has a right to know.”
“Because this isn’t just about one or two people anymore,” Rin replied. “You said it yourself... Volod Andrik doesn’t like non-humans very much. The Mercurions already live in the Tanner’s District ghetto and can’t even own property. The Meewfolk h
ave it even worse in the International District. If the Volod finds out the Slayer of Taltos is a Mercurion, he’ll punish all the non-humans in the city more than he already does. He might even order a massacre.”
I groaned and rubbed the bridge of my nose. Just what I wanted in a role-playing game: genocide. “Great.”
“It didn’t used to be that way... something changed between the end of the history acceleration process and the time I was loaded in,” she added quickly. “This city is very centrally located in Artana, so it was expected that a lot of crafters would set up here and it would become a big market hub. Andrik isn’t even supposed to be the King. The Volod should have been his brother, Ignas, but Ignas committed suicide. I guess OUROS didn’t think we had enough conflict here.”
I thought back to what the High Forgemaster had said about suicide being a disgrace, and the Taltos Archemipedia entry with its bugged out character code. The optimist in me hoped it was a coincidence… a small oversight in the game that hadn’t been corrected once the story had changed. But I was holding the Spear of Nine Spheres. That was a bug, too – and that bug had nearly been the death of me.
“Apparently, the Architects forgot to account for human nature.” I patted Karalti on the head, rubbing her horn stubs until she began to relax. The predatory focus in her eyes softened, and she crooned and butted against my hand. “Look, we can’t just stand around. I need to investigate the scene of the crime, and at least alert the city guard to what happened at the hospital. And I’m going to find Kanzo and finish this quest. How did you know where he was, anyway?”
Archemi Online Chronicles Boxset Page 45
