by John L. Monk
Seven dejected-looking people in mostly noob tunics sat around a smoldering campfire. I hovered close for a listen.
“When he comes out, I still say we try talking to him,” an attractive woman said. She wore a robe I’d left behind because I hadn’t wanted to strip it off her.
“But he might know what’s down there,” a man said.
If my lurking soul had eyes, they would have blinked. Above the head of each adventurer was a baseball-sized orb like the one in Cipher’s lair. It turned gold when one or the other spoke, stayed that way a few seconds, and then faded away.
At my close range, I could easily squint their levels and classes.
The woman who’d spoken was a level-30 wizard. The man was a level-26 bard … for some reason. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why there’d be a singing poet out here—and a 26th level one, at that.
The rest of the players had more sensible classes:
Ranger, 21st.
Warrior, 29th.
Priest, 25th.
Monk, 20th.
One woman was a mix of classes: warrior 15th, thief 20th, and monk 7th. Her player level was 42.
The fact that I’d killed this woman and her friends was sort of amazing. They must have thought so too because they were talking about it now.
“I told you, already,” the high-level woman said. “He’s a sorcerer. Total twink class, and rare. When he comes out, we spread wide so he only kills a few of us. A spell like that big one’ll drain him quick. Then the rest of us can smash him flat. After that, Chuck’ll rez the dead and we’ll start the Trial before he returns.”
“I want my sword back,” the warrior grumbled. “It levels with me. It’s even rarer than sorcerers.”
When he said that, the orb over his head turned black, then faded a few seconds later.
“Would you please shut up about your stupid sword?” the bard said.
The warrior said something nasty, then the others jumped in with angry words on all sides. Eventually the high-level told everyone to shut up. Surprisingly, they listened.
My awareness hovered roughly six feet off the ground and moved with ease. The steady trickle of mana far outpaced my regeneration, but I wouldn’t run empty for about thirty-five minutes.
When it was clear they wouldn’t do more than mope and wait, I pulled back to my body and the spell ended.
“Twink class?” I said, trying the strange word on for size. “What the heck’s a twink?”
The manual had a glossary of terms used by gamers. Twinks, it said, were low-level players with access to gear or abilities generally considered overpowered.
An hour later, fully regenerated, I stood next to the gong, hammer in hand. Then I called up the screaming demon, Ghanut.
I pointed overhead. “Fly straight up to the surface, run down the hill, stop just before the trees, and then wait.”
In a blaze of heat and light, the demon soared to the cavern ceiling. The description said no obstacle could stop it, but I didn’t know if it flew through walls or blasted through them. A few seconds later, when the cavern grew darker and no rocks rained down, I had my answer.
“Lurk,” I said.
With both Lurk and Ghanut whittling away at my mana pool, I shot through the ceiling. The encampment, as expected, was now empty. Most of the adventurers were chasing the demon down the hill, firing spells at it. Ghanut’s description said it had lots of health and good resistances, so I wasn’t too worried. It only had to last a little while.
The high-level lady hadn’t run down with the others. To my dismay, she’d stayed near the gong with a sword and a dagger, peering around suspiciously.
Ghanut, begone! I mentally said, and some of the drain on my mana stopped. I also sucked back my consciousness, ending the Lurk spell.
I banged the gong loudly with the hammer, then gasped as a vortex of air lifted me toward a hole I hadn’t seen on either of my ethereal passes. Like drink through a straw, I swooshed through and landed lightly in the swamp above.
A flash of light on steel and 250 health points vanished from my shield with the woman’s overhead slash. Before I could react, she rolled with the momentum and punted me ten feet backward with a karate kick that stripped off another 30 points.
“Greater Lightning Bolt!” I shouted, knocking her back a pace. Her skin pulsed blue when the spell hit, absorbing the damage.
Another chunk of my shield disappeared in a blaze of light from that 30th level wizard.
Focusing on the high-level, I shouted, “Greater Poison Lash!”
“Acid Orb!” I cast at the wizard.
Not waiting to see the effects, I cast Greater Sprint and bolted down the hill. The rest of my shield blew away and I felt like something was cooking me from the inside.
Screaming in fresh pain, I kept going. Five minutes later, the spell died before I did, and the adventurers were nowhere in sight.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Wet again,” I said, easing through a reedy section of calf-high water.
I’d attacked with poison and acid because the lingering effects would occupy the wizard and multi-class woman. The idea being maybe they’d think twice before following me.
Every few minutes, I checked the sky to ensure the wizard wasn’t flying around up there. The manual said wizards could fly early in their ranking, and with my Greater Shield still on cooldown, I wasn’t taking any chances.
To pass the time, I read up on bards. What little there was said they were special, like sorcerers, diabolists, and diviners. Very little about what they could do, though.
“Guess I’m a twink after all,” I said, considering I was three special classes at once.
As if in response, something roared in the distance ahead of me. A familiar roar—it was that giant I’d been so afraid of. But that had been more than fifteen levels ago.
Safe from those adventurers, I found a relatively dry tuft of reeds and waited for my wounds to heal and my Greater Shield to come back. Yes, I was going for the giant. Jaddow obviously thought the Trial of Pain would take longer than it had, and I intended to use the time wisely. Also, when he saw how good I was doing—leveling up—he’d be more inclined to help me.
Thirty minutes later, another roar. I was pretty sure the creature was in one of those tree-covered areas the monkeys were so fond of. Though with all that noise, they were likely gone by now. Just as well.
Fully healed and with my shield back in place, I slipped through the trees and stopped when I saw the giant sitting in an open area.
The rags it wore were so filthy they blended almost perfectly with the muted undergrowth, making the brute appear almost naked. Wide and tall, it sat on the ground chewing on a bone like an enormous dog. A massive club stood pushed into the ground next to it.
This giant looked different than the first one I’d seen, though they shared similarities. Like the other, its features resembled that of an enormous misshaped human. But it only had one head. And it was a little bigger—over twenty feet tall.
During the walk from the mound, I’d had another look at my diviner spells. At multiple skill points apiece, I couldn’t afford to waste any on bad choices. Discern, I felt, was a spell I could use at any level and still benefit from, so I chose it.
Spell name: Discern
Rank available: 20
Mana cost: 75
Cooldown: 1 second
Range: 100 feet
Description:
Use this naughty spell on an opponent and glean their under-the-hood qualities. Yes, we’re talking stats here. Not very role-playing of us, but you’ll just have to deal with it. Oh, you’ll want to be careful when you cast this sucker. Sometimes it tickles.
I also chose a second spell:
Spell name: Reveal Weakness
Rank available: 20
Mana cost: 75
Cooldown: 1 second
Range: 100 feet
Description:
You really need a spell des
cription? It’s right there in the title! Still reading? Sheesh … Okay, for your tenacity, know that this spell tickles twice as much as Discern, so be wary … Pretty much always be wary, in general. Best advice ever. Scary rhymes with wary, and nobody knows why. You do realize this spell reveals weaknesses, right? So why are you still reading? That’s fine, I’ll wait. Still waiting … Oh yeah, beware the bloooooooo…
Not for the first time, I wondered at the sanity of the people who’d designed this game. If they couldn’t take their jobs seriously enough for the little things—like a simple spell description—where else had they slacked off?
Focus, I told myself.
From my hiding spot behind a tree less than fifty feet out, I gazed at the giant and silent-cast, Discern!
A wealth of information suddenly populated the notes section of my character sheet:
NAME: Lumbering Swamp Giant
CLASS: Brute
LEVEL: 48
BASE DAMAGE: 600
HEALTH POINTS: 1200
The giant looked around like a dog quirking its head at the mention of a treat. When I didn’t jump out and shout, “Surprise!” it went back to chewing its bone. Also like a dog.
Divination, in my opinion, was great. That guy, Bite, was creepy and powerful, and he seemed to know a lot, but in this he’d never been more wrong. It was most definitely not a curse.
Smiling like a wise-and-not-cursed fool, I cast my next diviner spell.
Reveal Weakness!
Two interesting things happened. One, a lovely entry appeared in my game log:
PRIMARY WEAKNESS: Fire (5x DAMAGE)
The second thing that happened was, at the casting of the spell, a blue nimbus flared around the giant. This made the creature leap to its feet and roar so loudly it tickled my molars.
“F-flame Lance!” I yelled, startled out of my wits.
Though low level, Flame Lance had a 20-second cooldown. If Reveal Weakness was right, I’d get five times the normal 70-80 points of damage. That and I knew it hurt like the dickens to be on fire.
Still bellowing, the giant grabbed its club.
“Solar Strike!” I cast while simultaneously thinking, Please be a fire spell! Please be a fire spell!
A beam of light stabbed out of the sky, through the trees, and hit the creature in the chest, flaring up in a puff of smoke. The giant staggered … staggered some more … then whipped its club around unbelievably fast, shattering my 500-point shield and flattening me to the ground for a residual 100 points of damage. With only 460 health points left, no way could I survive another strike like that.
It’s times like this when agility and strength mattered more than spells.
When the giant reared back for another smash, I grabbed the club and held on tightly as it carried me aloft. At its zenith, I let go and flew through the high canopy, passing several astonished monkeys spectating from the high branches.
Then I was falling, falling…
Another 55 points wicked away when I hit an exposed tree root, knocking the breath out of me. Stars, colors, agony … But no broken bones. I wasn’t sure if I could break bones. Blunt-force damage was identifiable by degrees of all-over body pain and missing points.
Somewhere along the way, I’d lost my staff and had to fall back on my other spells.
Greater Lightning Bolt! I cast silently, jaw clenched against the pain. This time, the creature’s bellows sounded less angry, though still hurt.
A concussive force rocked the area, taking me down another 15 points. A glancing blow, but I wasn’t the focus of the attack. No, that’d be the giant, presently broken in pieces all over the huddled clearing.
ENEMY DEFEATED: Lumbering Swamp Giant, 55,500 EXPERIENCE POINTS (SHARED)
My spirits lifted at the thought of Jaddow’s sudden arrival. Then rough hands grabbed me from behind.
A man’s voice sang out:
“Your spells no longer matter,
Not today, not today!
Your magic seeps, weeps, and sputters out,
Away, away, away!”
He sang those lines repeatedly while I mentally shouted Acid Orb! Greater Lightning Bolt! Sprint! But every time, the verse snatched it away like a thief. Desperately, I tried summoning an apple to throw at someone, but even that was denied to me.
“Shit, grab him!” someone yelled.
I’d twisted free and even managed a few steps before being tackled. In that short time, I learned they were the same adventurers from back at the mound. It was that bard who was singing. He stood leaning against a tree in a noob tunic belting out stanzas like a machine while watching me steadily.
“Where’s my sword!” the warrior yelled, digging through the bag I’d looted from them. He pulled out the other bottomless bags it contained and started emptying those, too. Whooping with glee, he held up an admittedly nice sword with a jeweled hilt.
“Great, you got your stupid sword,” the wizard woman said, “now shut up.” She snatched one of the bags and searched through it.
“Gimme my rings, twink,” the priest—a man—said, tugging off both my rings.
Someone else yanked off my robes and boots, leaving me bruised and pathetic in my Mythian underwear.
That’s when the high-level warrior/thief/monk woman appeared. Her gaze was piercing, and she didn’t seem as interested in my belongings as the others. No, she considered me coldly, as if deciding how best to exact revenge.
Which was fine. My mind was on other things.
Far overhead, hanging fascinated from a flimsy branch, was a swamp monkey. Clenched in its monkey fist was a coconut.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Tell us about the Trial,” the warrior/thief/monk lady demanded over the still-singing bard. “Everything, or we’ll hurt you so bad you’ll be forced to give up. And trust me: it’s a long crawl back from level zero.”
Joke’s on you, I thought. Giving up would kill me for good. But I didn’t tell her that.
“Trial?” I said, blinking curiously. “You mean like with a judge and a jury and all that? What trial? Where’s my lawyer?”
Well that did it. The sword-happy warrior beat me to within an inch of my life. Literally. At the last second, maybe thirty points from death, the leader kicked him off me and called over the priest.
“Heal him back to full,” she said. “If he doesn’t talk, we’ll take him down again, then up again, then back down. He’ll tell us eventually. And he’ll definitely regret the day he messed with the Crimson Sigil.”
Crimson Sigil…
I’d heard that named before, in the streets of Heroes’ Landing. Some sort of club.
The priest healed me back to full, banishing the pulsating wound that was me. Desperately, I reached for my spells, but that damned singing scattered my efforts like twink dust in the wind…
“He thinks it’s funny!” the warrior said and proceeded to kick me, killing me slowly in 20-point chunks. At the last second, just when I thought he’d go too far, the priest pulled him off and healed me.
“Watch the damage, moron,” he said. “Can’t you see he’s trying to make you kill him?”
Smiling, I said, “Do you idiots really call yourselves the Crimson Sigil? Which one of you keeps the sigil? And is it crimson for real or a cheap scarlet knockoff?”
The leader rolled her eyes.
“Look,” she said, “we just wanna know what’s in the Trial. The challenges switch every couple of weeks, and nobody in the guild’s done it recently. If you tell us, make it convincing, we’ll kill you quick. Then you can go on being an asshole somewhere else.”
I nodded. “I get it. Good cop, bad cop, and he’s the bad cop with the cheap sword. I almost threw that stupid sword away. Even Crunk’s Junk wouldn’t take it!”
The warrior howled in fury and jumped on me. Or tried to. The priest and the leader barely held him back as he punched, kicked, and struggled to murder me.
I, meanwhile, focused every point of agility I had to catch
the coconut the monkey had tried dropping on the priest’s head. I then threw that coconut directly at the still-singing bard, catching him in the mouth.
The bard fell over.
He stopped singing.
“Rain of Fire!” I shouted, applying the targeting overlay to the clearing.
“Rain of Fire!” I shouted again.
Even though I’d fit the greenish overlay on everything but me, the superheated air still burned me for 190 points of damage.
At 500 points of damage per person hit, the spell took out four of them immediately. My game log practically blurred with the points counts. I even leveled to 46. The warrior and the leader had considerably more health than the others, of course, but like me, they were in a bad way.
My agony was extreme, as usual, but I’d expected it and they hadn’t.
“Spike Blast!” I gasped, skewering them with enough spikes for five adversaries.
The warrior died immediately. The leader was a bloody mess, but didn’t die. She kung-fu punched the air, rippling the space between us, slamming me against a tree for 175 points.
“Gwader Inbisabal Bist!” I sputtered around broken teeth and a partially torn tongue.
The game figured out my meaning, and that was the end of the Crimson Sigil.
For now.
Quickly, I looted the dead of gear and stuffed it in a bottomless bag. Even the robes and armor from the women. Maybe I wanted to send a message. Or maybe I was angry at being tortured—of all things—by my fellow citizens. These people had once been civilized.
Like me…
Stripping the women felt wrong, but I tamped it down. They weren’t even naked. The game gave everyone noob underclothes.
In a petty act of revenge, I tossed the warrior’s precious sword to my monkey savior, who’d somehow avoided the explosions and blasts. Deftly, the creature caught it. Then, screeching in triumph, it swung through the trees and disappeared with its prize.
Just as I moved to make my own escape, a voice behind me said, “You have got to be the worst player I’ve ever met.”
