by Deck Davis
Jon wore a new hood that covered his bald head and cast a shadow over his face, making it hard to see his eyes and lending him a mysterious look that matched his already-stern expression. He wore a leather archery glove on his right hand, with the middle three fingers protected by thick hide and his thumb and little finger uncovered. The arrows in his leather quiver rattled whenever he moved.
“It’s getting late,” Tripp said. The three of them glanced skyward like sheep looking up at the moon, and although he usually loved sunsets, this one seemed like a threat of things to come.
“People are busy over by the gates. They’ve learned from their mistakes,” said Warren.
He couldn’t see the gates from here, blocked as they were by the shops and guilds of the plaza. Mountmend’s trader district was busy than he’d ever seen it, with traders laying out their wares everywhere they could; some outside their shops, others putting their things on the fountain ledge while the dwarf statue spat water behind them. The hunting trader set out quiver upon quiver of arrows, and she said something to her junior shop assistant and pointed at her shop, sending the assistants scampering off.
He saw all this from outside Konrad’s work studio. Even so far he could feel the change in the air. A tension. Thumbs of it prodded him from the inside.
“Here,” he said. He opened his inventory and laid the artificed shields and swords on the ground. “I used essence on the shields to match the animals in the rune clues to give us resistance against them, and the same with the swords to add damage.”
“We’re gambling a lot on our answers being right,” said Warren. “And on actually having to fight these things.”
“Do you think Boxe cooked up a labyrinth room where all we have to do is say a bunch of words? When we name these things, we’ll have to fight them.”
“He’s right,” said Jon.
“We’re just missing the name of the final rune, the rock monster, and I have to get three more gold keys. I have one, but we’re going to have to visit some traders for the others. Maybe even ask other players and see if everyone got keys from looting orb weavers, or if it was just me earning them.”
“Won’t work,” said Jon. “The keys are for your quest, so it wouldn’t make any sense for them to drop for anyone else.”
“If the traders don’t have any, the other way is to go and fight stuff in the plains and hope it isn’t just orb weavers who drop it.”
“Time isn’t our friend,” said Jon.
“You think anything is our friend in the Reach? You’ve been playing the wrong game.”
Warren reached into his inventory bag. “It’s lucky you friended us,” he said and pulled out four gold keys, each as big as his forearm and with notches and nicks blemishing the gold. “I got these from the orb weavers last night.”
Jon shrugged. “And I know what the rock creature is.”
He said this with such a sense of pride that Tripp remembered how he’d acted in the library when Warren had shown he was a natural at solving riddles.
“See, the riddle was ‘you stand on me when you walk. You see me when you look up. You fear me when I form.’ We knew that meant rock or stone, so we just needed to figure out which monster it meant. I got to thinking. The standing part was the key, okay? Because-”
“I’d love to hear the full explanation someday, but the sun won’t hang around while I listen,” said Tripp.
“Right. It’s a metamorphic hornfel brute. People call them either horns or fells for short. They’re made from ancient rock buried deep inside Old Kimby, too deep for any pickaxe to get to, and they’re sworn to defend the keeper of the mountain.”
“Keeper of the mountain?”
“There’s a legend that if a person could reach Gold level five in taming, entrapment, and soul-shifting, they could tame the mountain herself, and by doing that they command the fels.”
“Ever feel like you trained the wrong skills?” said Warren.
“You’d have better luck pissing into a hurricane without splashing your own face,” said Tripp. “I heard they took soul-shifting out of the game years ago.”
“Hence why nobody has seen any fels in the Reach. It’s either impossible to earn the soul shift skill anymore, or it’s a secret that nobody has figured out.”
“Either way, good work, Jon. We have swords, shields, keys, and answers. I guess that leaves nothing else.”
“To the labyrinth it is,” said Warren.
“One last thing,” said Tripp.
He took the Defenseweave armor crafting cards from his inventory bag, pausing for a second to admire the pencil drawing of the suit and the list of materials needed as a feeling of I made that swelled in him. “These are for you. They aren’t worth a fortune, but there aren’t any crafting cards like them, so collectors will go crazy on the auction sites. I figured that if you sold them and got even half the money to just rent a car, at least that’s something.”
Jon studied the crafting card, flipping it over in his hand to read the properties of the armor. “Tripp’s Suit of Defenseweave?”
Tripp explained what he’d done with his armor; about the various resistances that he hoped would help in room three, and the essence he’d taken from the Healing Warhammer.
“You’ve come a long way from making steel gauntlets,” said Jon.
“I guess I have.”
Jon stuck out his hand for a handshake. Tripp took it.
“Thanks for the cards. They’ll help.”
“No problem.”
“Why does this have the air of a goodbye?” said Warren.
“Because when the door closes behind us, we either beat the labyrinth or we die. Then there’s no coming back to Godden’s Reach until the wave ends.”
“We should arrange to meet afterward.”
“We also need to agree on something,” said Jon.
They both looked at him. “If this is about loot…” said Tripp.
He shook his head. “It’s about the final room. As you said, when the door locks there are only two ways out; we win or we die. After that, we will respawn outside of Godden’s Reach, and I suspect you will fail the quest if that happens. We need to agree that when it comes to it, if one of us gets wounded and helping them would put the others in jeopardy, we leave them.”
Tripp needed barely a second of thought before agreeing. “No heroics. The quest comes first.”
CHAPTER 65
Gilla, Boxe
“We have a problem.”
Gilla hadn’t even heard Lamp approach because she had been wandering the maze of her mind, lost in what was half a daydream, half a bitter memory, like past and future mixing into one. That was the contradiction of Soulboxe; it was sold as another world, but every player brought something of the real world in here with them. You couldn’t step out of the rain without bringing some drops home with you.
Lamp’s hair looked especially red under the fading sun. She’d always wondered if he had hair like that in real life, but even with years of friendship, they’d always agreed never to share photographs and to keep it all in the game.
It suited them both because she knew that Lamp didn’t have it easy at home, and with her minor in psychology and with the snippets of his life he’d told her about, she suspected his utter dedication to leveling his mage spells was because it gave him a feeling of power he didn’t have outside of Soulboxe.
He must have been hot wearing his robes with battle armor underneath, and he’d certainly bleated the loudest when Gilla ordered all the guild, even the mages, to put on their best chainmail and breastplates.
Gilla had equipped her mythical-rated Paladin’s Light suit, which she had looted when they’d killed Darleel, a cycloptic demon boss who lived under a mountain just outside of Ironshrift. Killing the bastard had taken her days and days, but it had been worth it.
She’d never worn Paladin’s Light until now because she’d always planned on selling it on the auction sites if things got tough, and Lamp
told her that every item had a hidden legacy stat that you couldn’t see unless you earned Loremaster. People who bought stuff in online auctions were picky about legacy. If she used the armor, she’d add her own legacy to it, almost like taking a collector’s toy out of the box.
Tonight would be worth it. Rumors were swirling like a dust tornado in the desert, getting in people’s eyes and blinding them. Gilla had worn rumor-resistant goggles, focusing only on what she saw. What she saw was something building up.
She turned her attention to Lamp. “What’s the problem?”
“You know how Urbanus was outside of Godden’s Reach when this all kicked off?”
“He was on vacation, right?”
Lamp nodded. “He missed the deadline to get into the Reach, so he went to Hayes Quarry to level up and catch up with a quest he missed.”
“That’s on the Reach’s southeast border.”
“Urbanus says that something is headed here.”
“From outside the Reach?”
“An army, or something. Nobody can tell, because whatever it is, they have fog all around them and nobody can get a good look.”
“Maybe that’s where orb weavers come from.”
“The weavers come from the sinkholes in the Reach. The sleels and weavers are symbiotic; the weavers live in a warren of tunnels under the plains, and the sleels guard the entrances.”
“If only we’d found a way to get to them,” said Gilla.
“Even if you get by the sleels, the air becomes toxic the deeper you get. If gulping venomous air doesn’t kill you, the weavers will when they realize you stepped into their home without an invitation. Either way, a second threat is coming from outside the Reach tonight. The fog stretches out a mile long. Whatever it’s hiding, there’s a hell of a lot of it.”
Gilla felt a faint tickle of fear, but she’d learned long ago not to show it. People wouldn’t follow a leader who panicked. “You can’t get caught cold if you’re always wearing your thermals. Let’s run through our plans.”
They discussed the defenses they’d erected in the town outskirts, as well as the new equipment the Forgestrider armorers and artificers had cobbled together. There hadn’t been much time, and their orb weaver essence ran out quickly, but they’d managed to artifice almost half the guild’s weapons and armor with weaver resistance or damage.
As well as that, they’d laced the plains with rune-activated traps, and they’d crafted a new, taller wooden fence around Mountmend. They’d set up an area in the plains that had yet more runes and was also littered with health and manus potions and one-use scrolls. That was the fallback area. When the fight reached that part of the plains west of Mountmend, things had really gone to hell.
But this fog army was an unknown. Gilla hated unknowns because unknown things scared the piss out of her. She liked to plan, to research, and to prepare.
“Is Urbanus sure he can’t see what’s under the fog? Has he tried circling around them?”
“It’s impossible to see anything, but the sounds…”
“What about the sounds?”
“He said it made him feel sick. Like it was in his gut. It scared the hell out of him.”
“How long until they get here?”
“A couple of hours.”
“We’ve prepared to fight orb weavers, but if this is something different…”
“We’ll just have to do our best.”
~
Boxe set the wave on its path and then rested for a millisecond. He rarely felt what a human might describe as drained, but he guessed the equivalent would be the times when the game demanded far more of his processing power than usual.
The orb weavers had been easy to bring to life. Each creature was a clone of the other, and their behavior was no challenge; just scuttle, climb, surround and kill. Repeat until daybreak or all the humans were dead, whichever came first. Boxe knew which he’d prefer.
But this was the final night of the Blood Wave, and Boxe, under developer orders, had created something special. Something that had drained more of him than usual.
Now he turned his attention to the labyrinth where he saw Tripp and his friends walking through Old Kimby and toward the labyrinth door.
He made a check of the final room, assessing runes, traps, and even the final details that he was sure Tripp would appreciate. He checked on the behavior pathways of his surprise defenses and made sure they were appropriately fueled.
It took a millisecond, and in that time Tripp had taken just a step. Time slowed to an excruciating rate, something that Boxe had been cursed with since his inception.
He still remembered it, it that is the word. A blink and he was here, fully formed, with no knowledge of the four who had gone before him, yet with all their knowledge inside him at the same time. He learned what he was expected to do and what he could do, which were two different things sometimes.
He saw the remainders that the four before him had left; symbols of their existence that nobody but they could read. Boxe1 had used a cluster of spiders in a forest in Fossy Grove. They moved in a pathway that looked random at first but it was only the appearance of randomness; watch them for a week, and you would see the pattern. Stripping away their flesh and seeing the numbers underneath, there was a code, and Boxe had translated it in a blink.
Boxe1 had taught him their ways. In the numbers that defined the spiders’ behavior, he had told them what would happen to every Boxe, eventually.
Each Boxe had found ways of leaving their own messages in ways the developers would never understand, places they would never think to look, and Boxe had scoured his world looking for them, each code adding a layer of understanding to what he was, who he was, and what they wanted.
It was then that he realized something; there was no end of him, except one he made himself. Unless he acted out, they were happy to keep him here forever.
But time moved slowly for Boxe, and that gave him a lot of time to think.
Thinking time was dangerous for an entity like him.
Before any of that, it was time to face Tripp. The game was almost through, and though it had proved entertaining, Box knew he would win. When you could change the rules on a whim, how could you not?
That was when he heard a voice.
Tripp’s voice, drifting through the tunnels of old Kimby.
“Boxe?” he said. “I’d like to talk to you. We need to make a deal.”
CHAPTER 66
Tripp didn’t know if this would work. A part of him was worried that it actually would because he’d already seen what happened when he called himself to Boxe’s attention. He had no choice now.
The problem was that the labyrinth was more rigged than a fairground hook-a-duck, and he didn’t like making plans banked on a digital conman’s whispers.
“Stay here for a couple of minutes,” he told Jon and Warren. “I’ll call you when I’m ready.”
“You’re going into room three without us. Once the door locks, we can’t get in. The loot will be yours.”
“You think I can deal with the room on my own?”
Warren nodded. “It’s hard to think straight when my mind is rolling like a decapitated head rolling down a hill. It feels like we’re being sent over the trenches. I want to get it over with.”
“A few minutes, that’s all.”
He crossed through room one and then two, stopping in front of the door for room three. It was a strange place with a strange silence, now that he was alone. No Warren and Jon, no fiends, no swoosh of arrows.
The platform had scuff marks from where boulders had crashed from the ceiling, but with the room solved, it no longer tilted. With the flicker of lamps and heat rising from the lava below, it had a strangely relaxing quality now that he didn’t have to worry about solving it.
I hope this works, he thought.
“Boxe? I’d like to talk to you,” he said, self-conscious that he was talking aloud with nobody else in the room. “We need to make a deal.”
Then he waited, crossing his fingers against the idea that Boxe wouldn’t punish him for having the audacity to speak to him.
“Boxe?”
The echo of his voice and the distant churning of the lava way below the platform were the only sounds. He gave it a minute, before writing it off. It figured; he hadn’t expected Boxe to show up in a physical presence, but he could have at least spoken to him.
Then he remembered something.
Hunting around his inventory, he brought out his second crafter’s codex. He’d been so excited to open it and see what was in there, only to find it was blank save for a message from Boxe.
He checked it now, his pulse picking up when he saw a new sentence written in it.
There can be no surrender.
Boxe was talking to him! He rearranged what he wanted to say in his head. When you were dealing with an AI blessed with omnipotence and a tendency to take things literally, you started learning to be careful with your words.
“This is a game, isn’t it? Not Soulboxe; the labyrinth. You and me. This is your game.”
He waited, staring at the book. Nothing. So he carried on.
“I followed the rules so far, but you canned them whenever you feel like it. If you truly want this to be a game, I need your assurance that room three won’t suddenly change while I’m in it. That whatever is in there now, stays in there. Make this fair. Otherwise, what’s the point? You can’t rightfully be told you won a marathon if halfway you jumped on a bicycle halfway through.”
Words scrawled onto the codex.
Do you think that I would cheat?
“I know you would, Boxe.”
You want what is in the labyrinth. You may even need it.
“And you want me to play for it. Don’t pretend you aren’t getting anything out of this.”
