“Always like to be helpful even if it means pulling chunks of molded flesh off a girl’s cheek,” I stated in an attempt to sound cool and realized I came off sounding like an idiot.
“Thanks,” Karian said.
She stretched up, and for a second I thought she was going to kiss me, then she rubbed her cheek against mine and smeared skeletal goo on my face. I backed away and rubbed at my cheek. Karian laughed and then turned away to look over the room I had torched.
It was skeleton goo, I thought in disgust, and then realized that maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.
26
DUNGEON DIVING FOR FUN AND PROFIT
It was hard to believe that AlgerTech had almost completely run out of money at one point.
Years before I had come on board the company had focused on iPhone and android apps. They had dabbled in online games, but a bunch of software pirating assholes had managed to crack one of their games, and then the servers had been inundated with users who hadn’t even paid for their software.
A subscription service had been introduced but that led to a lot of ill will in the gaming community, no matter how the company tried to spin it. I understood. If a company promised an online gaming experience for the cost of the base software it wasn’t cool to turn around and start charging a monthly fee.
The small team of five had nearly called it quits when the idea for Realms of Th’loria had been born. They had appealed to investors but the MMO market had been saturated at the time. But Howard had been so passionate about his vision, combined with the sudden boom in VR gear, that he managed to collect enough investors to get them through a year.
Sarah Oliver had left the company shortly before Th’loria had launched but it was rumored that she remained on payroll to provide assistance with the broad strokes to the game. That was, major new zones ideas, as well as races, and guild creation. All of this was pure speculation, of course. You could ask five people at AlgerTech how the company had formed, and you would get five different answers.
I had a feeling she was still very active in the game, and she might just be a particular goddess who had sent me on this quest in the first place.
“This wasn’t so hard. Kinda easy if you ask me,” I said and strode toward the center of the room.
“Too easy,” Oz cocked an eyebrow at me.
“You know what I mean. It’s not like we had to fight through endless passageways,” I said.
“There’s a passageway right there,” Oz pointed at an open doorway that led into darkness. “Maybe we can go and explore, see what else this place has that wants to kill us, then come back and get that blue shard.”
“I’m just saying,” I tried.
“I know. I’m just giving you shit,” Oz grinned. “Get the shiny so we can turn it in. Then I can go find some AI ladies of the evening with my part of the reward.”
“Gross,” Karian rolled her eyes.
“What?” Oz lifted his hands in the air and shrugged. “You mean you’re not curious what sex is like here?”
“God no,” Karian protested.
“Or did you? You did, didn’t you? Grayson,” Oz taunted.
“Again. That’s gross.”
“Can we argue about boning AIs later?” I said in frustration. “Let’s get out of here.”
The pedestal bore our prize, and in seconds, I would hold the sliver of a shard. Even if it was corrupted, I would be able to complete the quest, and probably see level 10 by the end of the day. I stifled a laugh.
“What’s so funny now?” Oz asked.
“Just that we did it,” I said as I approached the stone. “Despite our differences we came together as a team.”
“Ohh rah,” Oz smirked. “But I guess you’re right. Good job, all.”
“Sarcasm?” Karian asked.
“Maybe a little. I don’t know why but this is kind of a letdown,” Oz said.
“How do you figure?” Thandroot stroked his beard.
“It took like two hours to do this whole quest,” Oz said. “For all of its realism this game needs a little more depth.”
“We’re underground. That’s deep enough for me,” Karian said.
Up close it wasn’t much to look at. The stone floated over a crude statue of Leefser, and it emitted a light similar to the binding stones but it was muted, and darkness swirled within the depths of the crystal. Oz picked up one of the stones on the pedestal and studied it.
“Emerald, I think,” Oz said and put it in his bag.
“Do I just grab the crystal?” I said.
“I guess,” Oz shrugged. “You get that one, and I’ll get all of these other gems. Damn, bro. We’re going to be set for life.”
I put my hand on the shard, and it stopped spinning. It was warm to the touch and felt a little fuzzy as if it gave off a small electrical charge. I closed my hand and lifted the piece.
It had a smooth side, I guess from being severed from a full shard, but how it had been scored and broken off was beyond me.
The crystal pulsed in my hand and my mana pool expanded so fully I couldn’t believe what my HUD was telling me. It pulsed again, and my pool continued to grow.
“It’s so powerful,” I muttered.
But there was something else there that felt off. No, not just off.
It felt downright evil.
My skin crawled, and it was all I could do to hold onto the stone. It was like spiders crawled up my back as I stepped away from the pedestal in revulsion.
The ground shook, apiece of the room to my right shifted, and with a crack that sounded like a cannon gave way and lowered to the floor. Figures waited in the space beyond, filling it as they surged forward.
“More fallen cultists,” I yelled.
Karian and Oz backed toward the hallway while Burp and his crew skittered around, screeched in fear, and did the sensible thing of running back down the hall we had just fought through.
The crystal pulsed again and I staggered into Oz. He seized my arm and dragged me along in the direction the goblins had fled.
Thandroot grabbed my robe’s sleeve and yanked on it until I stopped and looked at him.
“You have to cleanse that shard, boy. The ring. Use it,” Thandroot said, then turned to my companions. “We have to hold them off while he completes the task. If we don’t then we’re in for a very unpleasant situation.”
“Why can’t anything in this fake ass world be easy,” Oz exclaimed.
“Focus,” Thandroot urged Oz.
Fallen cultists flooded into the room, and several of the hooded figures lifted their hands. I knew that gesture too well. They were about to blast us back to the binding stone.
“They’re getting ready to cast; get back,” I warned.
“This is gonna hurt,” Karian exclaimed.
Oz yanked the crossbow off his back, lined up a shot, and fired. The bolt found the lead cultist, punched through his outstretched hand, and into his body, throwing the man into his cohorts. Oz pulled out another bolt as he backed up and then worked on pulling the string back for another shot.
There had to be at least thirty fallen cultists, and they kept on coming. Not only that but the whole lot were yellow to me.
“You cleanse the stone, or whatever you’re talking about,” I said and held the stone toward Thandroot.
“I can’t, and I don’t have time to explain. Focus on the tool I gave you. Touch it to the crystal and cleanse it,” Thandroot said in a panic. “Quick before he gets here. We’ll buy ya some time.”
I took the stone with the other hand as I backed up, and touched the ring’s metal band to the smooth surface. I don’t know what I expected but what I got was a big fat nothing-burger. The only thing I felt was malaise as the stone pulsed and sent shock waves through my body. My tongue felt like it was suddenly covered in fur thanks to the evil the stone emitted. I wanted to hurl the damn shard away and then run away for an hour.
Thandroot dug out another thunder and ripped the cord, then h
e tossed it over the heads of the cultists, and into the room beyond.
“Back,” he yelled and shoved me out of the way. I stumbled into the passageway with Karian and Oz as cover.
The explosion was larger than the acid spell mixed with fire. It knocked out my hearing, and the pressure made my ears pop. We were in cover, but that didn’t prevent us from nearly getting flattened by the noise and resulting cascade of falling ceiling.
Another roar from our rear sounded as the ceiling completely caved in, blocking the hallway. So much for going out the way we came in.
Thandroot picked himself up off the ground and brushed off his vest.
“Is that all of them?” Oz shouted as he shook his head and pressed his hands against the side of his skull. “I can’t hear shit!”
The wall ahead of us gave way, sliding to the floor and revealing a fresh wave of fallen cultists. I focused on the lot and found that we were about to face an entire room of red enemies. We were going to die horrible deaths in the next few seconds.
“The way out is blocked. We’ll have to find another means of escape,” Karian yelled as she got a look at the collapsed ceiling behind us.
“Get that stone cleaned,” Thandroot yelled at me, and rushed in to meet the enemies with his maul held high.
Karian took on the lead cultist while Oz reloaded his crossbow. He aimed, pulled the trigger, and the bolt flashed across the room and took one of the cultists in the chest. The man lowered his hood to reveal his pebble-laced face and snarled at Oz.
Son of a bitch. It was poppa bear all over again except there were at least fifteen of them.
Thandroot knocked the legs out from under one of them, and then tried to follow up with a kick, but the cultist rolled away.
The mana pool surged again as the crystal pulsed. I staggered back and considered the odds here. We could always take the death, as much as that sucked, wait a while, then come back when we were higher level and had much better gear.
Karian swung her blades across her body, as a cultist reached into his robe and pulled out a long, curved blade that glistened like obsidian coated in oil.
Karian feinted left, then swung her blade under the cultist but he whipped his free hand down and stopped the blow before it could find his flesh.
Oz fired another bolt, but his potential victim snatched it out of the air and threw it to the floor.
Oz loaded again and prepared to fire.
“Don’t kill them,” a voice intoned from the back of the room. “I want every one of them alive.”
The voice was, on the one hand, familiar, but it dripped so much anger I couldn’t be sure if it were a bad guy or a caricature. He was like something out of a B-movie.
“Stop what you’re doing, or I’ll wipe out this entire room,” I held the shard aloft and completely bluffed.
“I would very much like to see you try,” the voice intoned.
Thandroot’s opponent took a blow to the midsection and folded up around it, but he grabbed the maul’s shaft as he fell and held on for dear life. Thandroot tried to yank it free, but two of the cultists jumped on him while a third kicked him in the head. Thandroot got a hand up next to his face, but the blow still sent him reeling.
Oz fired again because I guess his attitude was “fuck you.” This time his missile found a cultist and smacked him in the upper arm. The man staggered with a grunt and then came back to his feet, and unleashed a spell that lifted Oz off the ground and threw him against the wall so hard my friend slid to the floor like a crash test dummy.
“Son of a bitch,” I said in frustration.
The cultist that Karian fought ducked a knife slash and came up fast enough to catch Karian with a blow to her chin. As she spun, her opponent slashed his blade across her back. Karian screamed in pain and went down in a heap.
“Asshole,” I shouted and thought of the acid spell. But what could I do? I might only piss these guys off more and burn my friends in the process. I wanted to rush to Karian’s side and drag her back, comfort her, hold her, and feed her the rest of the potion she had given me.
The shard pulsed one more time, and I nearly dropped it.
“Feel that? It’s me. The shard only responds to me,” the voice said.
I pushed aside my anger and tried to do as Thandroot had advised. I probed for the shard and felt it push back. The ring wasn’t doing a bit of good. Why had Thandroot even given me the stupid thing?
The cultists parted like a wave as a new figure came into view. He wasn’t very tall, and he sure as hell didn’t look like one of them. He wore a full set of armor created out of what appeared to be lizard scale, and each interlocking piece shimmered around the sharp ends in hues of greens, blues, and deep gray, changing as it captured and perverted the wan light in the room. A helm covered his face and a pair of short golden horns sprouted from the place where his ears would be. There was a slit for his eyes, and they were blue and piercing, somehow familiar. Once again I had the strangest sensation that I knew him.
“Uh. Stay back,” I stumbled as I backed up until my ankles struck the collapsed passageway nearly spilling me back on my ass.
“Give that to me, and I may let you die,” he said in a deep voice that grated on my last nerve.
“I’ll burn everything in this room,” I warned again.
The stone resisted my senses. I concentrated on the ring, but it was just as useless as it had been a minute ago. The crystal pulsed one more time and the electric current made my teeth clench, and my eyes try to cross.
“You are a sight,” the man said. “So feisty. I like that. Who would have thought you and your companions would even make it this far? I suppose our experiment can be called a success.”
“Your what? Who are you?” I tried to buy time as the ice spell formed in my head. It wasn’t much, but it was better than going down without trying to fight back. “Or should I say, what are you?”
“I supposed you could call me a colleague from the past,” the man said.
Wait. Why had Thandroot have given me a ring in the first place? It obviously didn’t work the way I thought it did but the crown part had some small gems.
With shaking hands, I turned the ring until the gems and the strange shifting star could make contact with the shard. Another pulse hit me, but it wasn’t as strong this time. Instead, the ring became so hot it burned my finger.
“What have we here?” the man asked.
“Falstace. You’re a real nob, you know that?” Thandroot said.
“Ah, is that you, Wimer? How did you get the body of a dwarf in the first place? I have to admit, you have eluded us for some time thanks to the disguise.”
“I guess you don’t know everything about this world. Like, did you know you look like a walking douche waffle?” Thandroot said. “You do. Like you woke up and read a bad book on how to be evil and then took all of the worst ideas and made that fucking outfit.”
“I’ll deal with you in a moment,” Falstace said.
“Oh. Okay, James Bond villain. Why don’t you take off your ridiculous mask and talk to me face to face,” Thandroot said.
“I imagine we will have many long hours to talk,” Falstace said.
The stone fought me, but I thought there might be something there. Another pulse and I nearly threw the shard aside because it sent electricity racing up my arm and made my hair stand up, or so it felt.
The pulse faded and the energy waned. I tightened my grip and probed again, but my attempt to penetrate got batted aside.
“Torture is it? Your breath has that covered,” Thandroot said as he struggled to his hands and knees. One of the cultists reared back for another kick, but Falstace waved him off.
“Let him stand up. He’s not much taller on his feet,” Falstace laughed.
Thandroot gathered himself but not until he had grabbed his stomach and coughed up blood. He spat a wad on the floor and then sucked in a breath.
“You’re not going to be much taller for long,”
Thandroot said and lifted his hand. He held another thunder. This one was smaller, but if I got an acid spell off again, we might clear this entire room and then wake up at the binding stone. It wasn’t ideal, but neither was being captured by this asshole.
“Clever. I would never have thought to make those, but you always were a crafty engineer,” Falstace said.
Thandroot’s eyes grew wide as the home-made grenade left his hand and shot across the room to land in Falstace's grasp.
I gritted my teeth as another wave came on, but this time it wasn’t as strong. What had I done wrong? My mind raced frantically.
Wait. I had prepped a spell that time and held it ready to unleash, and my mana had responded by dropping. Was that it?
I focused on the ring and redirected my spell. It’s hard to explain how but I trickled my mana pool toward the round hunk of metal, and it responded by lapping it up. Perhaps it was the skill that Ansalon had taught me. The ability to control my mana flow. Something shifted in the crown of the ring, and suddenly I felt it.
Power. So much power.
But it came with a cost. As my mana coursed through my body, pain exploded in my head. I tried to slow it down but the stone lapped up my mana, and with every bit, the nauseating agony rocked my skull and made my eyes ache. Like someone shoved a bar of white hot metal between my eyes.
“Where should I put this?” Falstace said. He ripped the string off the explosive and tossed it right at Oz.
“No,” I screamed.
Falstace lifted his hand, and a bubble of iridescent energy sprang to life around the thunder. The grenade exploded, but the shell contained the blast.
“Any more tricks?” Falstace chuckled.
“I might have one,” I muttered.
I dumped the last bit of mana I had into the ring even though I was convinced it would kill me. I’ve never felt pain like that, and I’d been killed in two horrible ways. With every beat of my heart, my head responded like a howling banshee had set up shop and begun to unleash tornados of pain.
But the ring answered with a pulse that felt nothing like the electric current that had passed through my hands. It was soothing, calm, and for lack of a better word, pure.
SHARDS OF REALITY: A LitRPG novel (Enter the Realm Book 1) Page 28
