by John L. Monk
This time I was ready for it. I fired Greater Invisible Fist and scored a direct hit for a flat 350 points of damage. The carp went flying my way and the tentacles retracted. In a panic, I splashed back to shore and scrambled to safety.
Once again, the monster hadn’t died.
“Dammit,” I said.
The carp was only a few feet out at this point, and it was no trouble at all to hook it with my staff and pull it in.
“Hmm,” I said, staring dubiously at my prize.
I’d never seen a carp up close before. It had big brown scales and a sucker for a mouth. Those times in life I’d eaten fish, they’d always come cooked on a plate, and only because Melody said I needed more omega-3s. Didn’t I need a knife to clean it? I was pretty sure you had to cut off the head first … and do something about the tail. But beyond that…
“Totally hopeless,” I said in disgust.
I was about to throw it back, then stopped. Muck monsters liked fish…
Though I’d never been fishing before, I knew the concept: you needed bait. The carp was proven bait. What I didn’t have was a hook.
Or maybe I did.
Poison Lash was a spell I hadn’t used yet because I didn’t know how quickly it would kill monkeys. But if I could use it to poison a carp, it wouldn’t matter how fast it worked.
Excited to try it, I set the fish a few feet away and cast the spell.
“Poison Lash!”
A whiplike effect snapped through the air and struck the fish, turning it a sickly shade of green.
The spell description said it caused 300 points of damage over the course of five minutes. Great damage, but not terribly fast. What I couldn’t tell was how long the poison would remain in my target.
Ten minutes later, when the carp stayed green, I figured it was long enough for my purposes.
The spell had a one-minute cooldown, and the description said it was “stackable.” I took this to mean I could cast it repeatedly, building up the poison over time. Testing the theory, I cast it against the carp every minute for fifteen minutes. With each lash, the fish grew darker and darker and eventually turned black.
Worried it wasn’t safe to touch, I slipped my boots over my hands, picked up the fish as best I could, and chucked it into the water. Then I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
The stupid fish was just sitting out there. Would the poison leak out? Could the octopus thing smell the poison on it? In the real world, octopuses were supposed to be pretty smart. Had that realism made it into the game?
Still I waited.
“Fine,” I said, and waded back out, still naked.
Just as the water reached my armpits, I saw a splash near the fish. Desperately I sloshed to shore, scrabbling and slipping in my haste to get away. No sucking tentacles grabbed me, but my heart beat like a hot cannon in my chest.
I realized I was grinning. Fishing was sort of fun.
When I looked back, the bait was gone.
Naked and muddy, I sat down and waited some more.
ENEMY DEFEATED: Muck Monster, 72,000 EXPERIENCE POINTS
I’d leveled twice in a row off that kill, bringing me to level 30. Despite that, no spells opened up. I’d get a batch of new ones at level 31, one of which was Greater Poison Lash.
“Something to look forward to,” I said happily.
Feeling safer, I jumped in and started swimming. I didn’t see the muck monster’s body, and for that I was thankful. Now that I was sleeping like a normal human, and not a lucid, nightmares were a definite factor.
My newfound agility had me swimming with ease. I was really enjoying my new nimbleness and impulsively applied 5 more points to it. Suddenly I was cruising like a gene-stacked Olympian. When I leveled again, I’d throw more into strength to see what happened.
The raft was a ten-by-ten platform of stacked logs. Tied to a spike in one corner was a rope running into the water. I reeled it in and found a heavy flat rock that had kept it from drifting away. There was also a pole, about twelve feet long, braided through the tar-infused ropes. I freed the pole, jabbed the end into the water, and hit bottom about halfway down. A long hard push and the raft was moving toward the shore.
“What the hell?” I said when I got there.
My clothes, staff, coin purse, and my pack with the water-purifying cup and tent were missing. Way up in the trees, a couple of furry faces poked through the foliage. One of them held a boot in the air and screamed with laughter.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Bring that back!”
An absurd thing to yell standing naked on a raft, but I was desperate. I could lose the rest, but without that cup, I’d be forced to drink the mucky water.
You need your clothes, too.
I could almost see Jaddow’s face when he showed up and found me naked and dehydrated, having lost who knew how many lives to dysentery.
“Greater Lightning Bolt!” I shouted.
Bright flash, thunder, and the branch the monkey was hanging from snapped in a cloud of oily black smoke. The monkey, however, had already vanished. More laughter followed my impotent blast, receding into the distance as the little shits eek-eek-eeked through the trees.
Chapter Thirteen
It was now clear why I hadn’t seen any more monkeys in a while: they’d been tracking me quietly, waiting for the chance to pounce. By leaving my few possessions behind like that, I’d played right into their hands. The only items I had left were my rings.
What a sight I must have been: stark naked, sweaty, poling my raft in the middle of a wide basin. Reedy tufts poked up here and there, but the area was monkey-free, and that suited me fine.
My map showed me still heading toward the center. Cup or no cup, turning back wasn’t an option I cared to entertain. My best tools, as the Everlife people said, were “all up here.”
I’d been traveling mostly without water for a good three hours now. The apples helped a little, but left my mouth feeling sticky and dry soon after eating them, which only served to make me thirstier.
“Greater Lightning Bolt!” I croaked, aiming for a spot about five feet out. When it struck, steamy water splashed into the air and rained around me.
No, I didn’t actually need to say the words. I could have silent-cast, but verbalizing (I’d found) helped influence where the bolt hit. Too close and residual electricity zapped through the logs I was standing on.
Quickly, I dropped to my knees and slurped where the water collected between the logs. It tasted grainy and a bit like dirt, but I figured it was clean. If lightning could kill fish, it’d kill any sort of bacteria or diseases lurking in the water.
A few seconds after drinking my fill, several fish floated up. More carp, and even a bass, all of which gave 1 XP apiece. When the bass got snatched down by a large tentacle, I whooped in delight and sent a Poison Lash into one of the carp. A minute later and I poisoned another, then waited, then did another. Maybe it was luck, or maybe the poison tasted good, because every time I poisoned a fish, that was the fish that got taken. I was able to poison two more before they were all gone.
Still the creature didn’t die, making me worry there were multiple creatures down there sharing the poisoned fish.
In a last-ditch effort, I fired another big lightning bolt.
ENEMY DEFEATED: Muck Monster, 67,000 EXPERIENCE POINTS
YOU HAVE ADVANCED TO LEVEL 31!
+5 Stat Points
+1 Class Point
+1 Skill Point
“Woo hoo!” I shouted, punching the air in triumph.
I’d worried the first creature was one of a kind—like Grandpa Salamander or the Spider Queen. But apparently there were more of these muck monsters. I only wished I’d figured out the poison trick earlier, rather than messing with those thieving monkeys.
“Level thirty-one and almost no work,” I said happily. “Take that, Jaddow.”
Jaddow would say I’d killed the creatures by “cheating” the game. Maybe
that was true for his suicide test, but I didn’t think it applied here. Otherwise, why was I able to cast on dead fish? Why was the spell stackable?
Now that I knew Poison Lash was so good, I invested a skill point into the greater version. This one caused 600 points of damage over five minutes, though at twice the mana. It had the same one-minute cooldown, and it even stacked with the normal version. Great for fishing, though less useful against anything I needed to kill quickly.
Over the next few hours, I killed eight more creatures and leveled five times before reaching an area near the swamp’s center.
On my last kill, I’d finally gotten a look at the creature as it thrashed through its death throes: big bulbous head, scabrous gray skin, and a massive sucker mouth with glasslike teeth. I might have gone on killing the ugly things, but with every level, the points per kill dropped by 5000. Also, from level 30-40, the points-to-level had jumped to 81,181. Still good XP, but I was sick of being naked, and not just for vanity reasons. Out on the water, the sun beat down like a hammer, and I was the nail. I ended up picking Fire Guard with one of my skill points, which dropped the temperature a few luxurious degrees.
Feeling better, I poled faster and harder, and an hour later grounded the raft in a stretch of soft mud and inch-high water. Tall reeds blocked my view of everything but the largest swamp trees half a mile beyond.
Working my way in was a long slog through the mud, and thirsty work. I took to chewing apples and spitting out the pulp to slake my thirst. My skin was sunburned and insect bitten. The bugs got so maddening, I dropped to my stomach and covered myself head-to-toe in mud, just to get away from them.
An hour later, after frequent stops to re-apply fresh mud, I reached the trees. The ground was drier here, and higher than the rest of the swamp by several feet. No monkeys either, for which I was thankful.
Even with most of my map grayed-out, I could still see the general size and shape of the swamp as a whole. The line of my progress ended exactly in the middle.
In time the trees stopped, and the ground ascended steeply into a massive mound, maybe forty feet high at its peak. Though not as soaring as I’d envisioned, it was nonetheless impressive, covering an area maybe a quarter of a mile in diameter. Muddy and slick, with no trees or grass growing on it.
Climbing would be tough, but not impossible. I knew this because of what I saw on top.
People.
Chapter Fourteen
Judging by the colorful fantasy outfits they had on—robes, jerkins, vestments, armor—they were definitely players. Seven of them, from what I could see.
“Hello!” I shouted.
They didn’t appear to hear me, but then I was pretty far away. Barely out of the trees.
I began jogging up the hill. With a whopping 21 points in strength, I made it much farther than I could have in real life, but pooped out halfway up. Dehydrated and miserable from too many insect bites, I was almost too weak to yell again, much less make it carry.
“Heeaaayaaaaooo…!” I yelled, then sucked in big lungfuls of air while my vision pulsed faintly with colorful stars.
One of the players—a woman in white robes with long dark hair—pointed my way and shouted something I couldn’t make out.
“Yaaahoaaaaah!” I yelled again.
The people at the top spread out, as if in formation. Then the girl with the long hair blasted me with a massive ball of fire. The fireball tore 85 points from yesterday’s Greater Shield, and the force of the blow knocked me over.
What the hell were they doing? Couldn’t they see I was one of them? Apparently they couldn’t, because an arrow bounced away, taking another 75 points. Then a beam of some dark magic stabbed downhill, sapping 130 more.
If I died again, I’d reappear just outside the swamp. I’d have to hike all the way back through monkeys, insects, and muck monsters—and that lumbering giant, which was still out there.
My Greater Shield vanished when a shining silver hammer smashed into it. If I didn’t do something now, in three minutes I’d be walking back.
After level 31, there hadn’t been any Jaddow-approved spells available until level 36. Oh, there had been grayed-out spells at 32, 33, 34 and 35, but I couldn’t select them. Likely I had to find them in the game somewhere or buy them from a store like Magical Matters. They looked good, too: “Lava Storm” and “Blade Swarm”—each of them starters to a series leading to Godlike 5.
One spell I could choose was “Shadow Assault,” which wasn’t part of a series. Jaddow had specifically warned me not to waste points on non-series starters. But he wasn’t here, the spell was powerful, and I was desperate.
“Shadow Assault!” I shouted, pointing at the hilltop. When the green overlay lit a portion of it, I shouted “Shadow Assault!” again and released the effect.
The swamp around me dimmed as if something had stepped in front of the sun, and the people on the mound started to scream. They flailed and ran, harried by winged shades swinging blades of living darkness. Mingled with the screams was an alien laughter that made me want to flee, too.
Through sheer tiredness, I held my ground as seven death announcements appeared and disappeared, and soon the world brightened again.
Shadow Assault was an area-of-effect spell that unleashed a horde of “shades” on a group of up to twenty enemies for a whopping 1000 points of damage over thirty seconds. Like Rain of Fire, it was castable once a day. Hopefully, I wouldn’t need it again anytime soon—literally, because of the mana cost: All Mana.
That’s right. I was now defenseless against anything I couldn’t squish with my foot. This added credence to Jaddow’s admonishment not to waste points on such spells. It was powerful, sure, but in a few hundred levels my mana pool could be in the thousands, while Shadow Assault would still pack the same punch.
As I crested the mound, I stared in disgust at the mutilated remains of seven people. Severed limbs, missing heads, and lots of blood like something out of a snuff sub from the real world. The hot swamp air was thick with the stink of exposed guts.
I’d gained a level off that fight, and with it access to an upgrade to my personal shield: Major Shield.
Major Shield cost 500 mana (deferred) and blocked 1000 points of damage. As with Greater Shield and Weak Shield, it stacked with Group Shield, which I still hadn’t taken. The stacking shields offered a lot of protection, but at 700 mana, the cost would be too high.
Worried I’d gotten carried away with strength and agility, I applied 20 of my 50 free stat points to intelligence. From here on, I’d only add to intelligence.
At 530 mana regen an hour, I’d need to wait two hours before fighting anything new.
Looking at the bloody bodies, I shook my head in disgust. I shouldn’t have had to fight other players. Why the heck had those idiots attacked me? Wasn’t the game easier if we all worked together?
Along with the bodies came weapons, clothes, and other gear. Magic gear, clearly, as none of it had been destroyed by the shadow demons. I left it alone for now and approached the exact center of the mound, where an enormous bronze gong hung suspended on a massive wooden gantry. An equally large hammer hung from a brass hook off one of the posts.
Until I was topped off, I wouldn’t be ringing any gongs.
“Let’s see what we got,” I muttered, and began sorting through the adventurers’ stuff:
Two pairs of boots, one leather and one steel. A pair of steel gauntlets. A wooden shield. Twelve rings, some of them quite pretty. Three staffs. Two swords and two daggers. Worn leather armor. Scratched and pitted plate mail armor. A lute. A suit of chainmail armor that shimmered in the sun. A crossbow with a beautiful dragon carved into the stock. A gem-studded belt.
I piled all this in a heap and left anything that was too bloody or required me to strip it off someone. I did loot their coin purses, however. And a good thing too: I was now sitting on over 68,000 gold. Also, four of the dead had magic sacks with even more loot: tents and camp supplies, two coils of
fifty-foot silk rope, seven fur-lined cloaks, a game of checkers, several decks of playing cards, and a collection of bone figurines.
These descriptions came to my mind automatically. The cloaks didn’t appear magical, but the bone figurines triggered a game notification when I touched them.
IDENTIFY ATTEMPT FAILED
“Huh,” I said, and put them back.
The sacks stretched wide, as if elastic, allowing me to remove supplies from one sack and put them into another, which never filled up. I then added the first sack, followed by the gauntlets, swords, daggers, and the crossbow. I examined the staffs one by one until I found a good one: +10 to all stats.
One fascinating discovery: the leather boots fit me perfectly. They offered +20 piety, which I couldn’t use (not being a priest), and +20 vitality, which I could definitely use.
Most of the robes gave me stat increases, but the ones I chose had fire protection, and nothing else. I wasn’t afraid of fire so much as I enjoyed the coolness against my skin when I tried them on.
The gem-studded belt allowed me to understand all monster languages, which would have come in handy back in the Swaze Pit. It was awkward enough over my new robes that I decided to stow it rather than wear it.
After some testing, I learned I could only benefit from two rings at a time. One ring upped my health pool by 200, and I swapped out my troll ring for it. The other was really interesting in that it gave me a new perk.
MAJOR PERK AWARD: Telekinesis
Chapter Fifteen
I put the ring on and pondered how to make it work.
“Move?” I said to a nearby severed leg, but nothing happened.
On a hunch, I waved my hand at the leg—and snatched it back when I felt its cold, clammy skin.
Oh.
I focused on the big hammer hanging next to the gong, about twenty-five feet away, and reached out. My fingers brushed the leather-bound handle. I made a grabbing motion, tugged, and the hammer came free. Though I wasn’t actually holding it, the hammer felt nonetheless heavy, and I had to support my ring hand with my free one to keep from dropping it. Then, because I wasn’t ready to bang the gong yet, I put the hammer back.
