Travail Online: Transcend: LitRPG Series (Book 3)

by Brian Simons

  His mind kept wandering though. What Coral had said bothered him. Something is going haywire. While Arbyten typically let the automated intelligence system run the game’s content, maybe a little human intervention was necessary this time. He logged into his admin account and started poking around in the game’s files.

  There were a lot of files concerned with pushing content from Server 215 across the rest of the game’s servers. That wasn’t a surprise. Server 215 hosted Coral and her friends, and when they sank Sagma’s tower the game had smoothed that content over the other servers for a consistent story and game history.

  Hector read through the files anyway. Server 215 was the only server affected by Otto and the Soulkeeper Axe, so if something had gone haywire, he might find it there.

  The logfile for Server 215 looked pretty normal. Then he came across another logfile for Server 215. That was strange. Each server only maintained one master list of its actions and interactions with other parts of Travail Online’s system. The second logfile was a mess. Its content was unrecognizable.

  Hector poked around until he traced a connection back to Server 215 that split off to another, unauthorized server also in Philadelphia. He looked into its running processes and saw that it was creating some kind of patch.

  He dug into some of the underlying files. One of them looked like a directory of AI personality files like the ones Hector was working on for Domin, but longer. It seemed to include every NPC in the game, even some of the more prominent characters.

  Another directory looked like it had personality files he didn’t recognize. These didn’t come from the same building blocks Arbyten had developed long ago, and they weren’t named after NPCs. The names looked like players’ handles.

  When he tried to get into those files, his computer abruptly shut off.

  He booted back up and tried to connect again, but it was gone. It was like the server had disappeared and cleaned up its tracks.

  Something was haywire.

  Hector picked up the phone but wasn’t sure who to call. If he went directly to the Board with this, and it was nothing, he’d lose whatever credibility he had by overreacting and overstepping. He needed to know what this server was doing. He also needed to know if Domin knew about this before going to the Board.

  He took his cell phone from his pocket and opened the audio notes application. Coral wasn’t the only one that could gather damning evidence. He hit record, and walked slowly toward Domin’s office.

  28

  The group trod carefully through the woods, wary of spiders that never showed. While they walked, Coral folded sheets of death’s veil together into sashes she wouldn’t wear just for the crafting XP. Eventually they found a pond that still had live fish in it.

  “Why isn’t this pond surrounded by players?” Coral asked.

  “Among the arackids?” Sal asked. “Lowbies wouldn’t farm near aggressive mobs like them. And the fish here aren’t valuable enough for higher level players to bother with.”

  Coral was grateful for the peace and quiet. She was starting to see what Ernest liked about fishing along the river. Though, she still didn’t have the patience to sit with a fishing pole all day.

  A small notice popped up alerting her to a new PM. She opened her communications menu. The PM reminded her that patience wasn’t her biggest problem, time was.

  >> New PM!

  From [unnamed_player]: Coral, this is Domin. I want my videos. Hop to it.

  She wanted to respond, but thought better of it. She’d record what she could and decide who to send it to later. While she had her communications menu open though, she sent a message to Daniel and Sybil, warning them that the forest wasn’t just full of elves.

  To [Daniel_of_Manayunk ; Sybil_in_Shrouds]: I’m in the Hiber Woods with Sal, and we just found out that Diardenna is going to be full of spiders. The Aracqueen is working with Sivona now. Also, Daniel, it sounds like Devon Shirk is after some kind of portal, and hasn’t given up trying to recruit you. Be careful out there!

  For now, she pulled her hook shot arrows out of her quiver and tied the fishing line around her wrist. She shot a fish with one. It floated to the surface of the water with the arrow poking through it. Coral tugged on the string and brought the fish to her, then repeated the process until there were enough fish to feed the whole group. Her method was much faster than Ernest’s, though he seemed to like his just fine.

  >> Congratulations! You have improved your Bowfishing ability to 2. Chance of catching rare fish: 2%.

  Sal roasted the fish and they ate by the pond. Coral crafted yet another belt while she ate, bumping her to the next level.

  >> Congratulations! You have reached Level 43. To apply your 4 skill points now, open your Skills and Attributes screen.

  >> New PM!

  That was fast. Coral opened her communications window, expecting to find a reply from Daniel and Sybil, but it was Domin instead. He had just sent her a message. Was he really going to pester her every ten minutes? She closed her communications window in disgust.

  “Did you guys notice back there that I couldn’t open my sewing kit?” Coral asked. “I couldn’t even get it out of my bag.”

  “What do you mean?” Sal asked.

  “Watch,” she said, reaching into her inventory. “Nothing. And I couldn’t grab the knife that was sticking out of Blat. I can handle the wooden shafts of my arrows, but not the arrowheads or the fishhooks at the tips.”

  “Pick this up,” Sal said, dropping his iron war hammer. Coral reached down, but her hand passed through the weapon.

  “Anything made of metal,” she said. “I think it’s this belt. It said the set bonus for one piece of this armor was ‘metal and bone’ Shiftwalking. Let’s see what happens without the belt.”

  She attempted to unequip the belt she had made from patches of death’s veil, but she couldn’t.

  >> Decayed Sash (+) (blighted) cannot be unequipped.

  “It won’t let me unequip it,” she said.

  “Is it cursed?” Sal asked.

  “Blighted.”

  “Must work the same way,” he said.

  “Great,” Coral said. “It reduces my Constitution, eats my Defense, and prevents me from crafting. How am I supposed to sew anything if I can’t touch a sewing needle?”

  “You were able to make that belt just fine,” Sal said. “Maybe you should make the whole set.”

  “How do I get it un-Blighted though?” she asked.

  “With a curse, you’d need some sort of magic to remove it. I don’t know what Blighted really means,” Sal said. “I’m Blighted though, after eating that ruined soul. So, welcome to the club!”

  That was not reassuring.

  “At least Quinnick can’t see this,” Coral said as the group trudged south toward the hill that supported Havenstock’s castle. “I’m sure he’d find a way to use this against us.”

  “Who’s that?” Varta asked.

  “He’s an elf Tactician that was following us around a week or so ago. He was trying to learn our weaknesses so the elves could exploit them.”

  Varta snarled. “Elves are the worst.”

  Blat got tired of walking and climbed up Coral’s back as they continued. It took the better part of an hour, but they finally reached the outer wall of Havenstock’s castle.

  ***

  “Here it is,” Sal said, pushing through the underbrush and pointing at the hill before them. The hill rose hundreds of feet before the stonework at the base of Havenstock’s castle began. It was too steep an incline to climb by foot. Coral knew that Embra was beneath the castle, but she had no way to know where underneath it.

  “How deep do the basement levels go?” Coral asked.

  “I don’t know,” Sal said.

  “What if we dug a tunnel through the side of the hill?” she asked. “I’ll bet Aga could manage that.”

  “Well,” Sal said, “we might end up digging under the castle and not find anything. Or we could di
g until we hit a stone wall that we can’t get through. Or into a part of the castle that is completely wrong. Or the castle could implode, especially given how unstable the land has been generally.”

  “So tunneling is a bad idea,” Coral said. “What about the windows?” She pointed to several rows of small holes in the castle wall secured by metal bars.

  “I don’t think any of us are small enough to get through the bars,” Sal said, “except maybe Blat.”

  “But if we could see into them, we might start to figure out where Grum is held.”

  “Okay,” Sal said. “I counted a dozen windows on this side of the castle. If Aga can get us up to that window first, we’ll peer inside. Neither of us have Nightvision, so we’ll have to hope it’s not too dark in there. We’ll give it a minute, come back down, and move onto the next one.”

  “That could take a long time,” Coral said, “but at least it’s methodical. If we see no sign of Grum, we’ll move around the hill and see how many windows are on the other side. Aga?”

  Coral turned toward the Dirt Mage, hoping she had a way to use the earth around them to get up to the windows. What she found, however, was a woman with her hands cupping her mouth.

  “Gruuuummmmm!” Aga yelled. Birds fled the nearby trees as her deep voice echoed through the woods.

  “Or we could do that,” Coral said. A pair of green arms emerged from one of the windows. “That must be Grum.”

  “I’ve got this,” Aga said, extending her arms toward the hill’s side and casting Brutes and Ladders. Large hunks of dirt separated from the hill and the ground, swirling in the air like a maelstrom of mud before reassembling as a set of stairs along the hill that led to Grum’s window.

  “Hurry now,” Aga said, “I can’t hold this all day.”

  Coral, Sal, and Blat hustled up the 26 stories of dirt stairs, large clumps of brown soil occasionally crashing to the ground below. She couldn’t imagine doing this for each window. Aga might have risked drawing attention to their group by yelling out for Grum, but it turned out well and Coral was grateful.

  “So Sal,” Coral said between breaths as they raced toward Grum, “you may have noticed. Varta has quite the crush on you.”

  “Wait, what?” he asked. “Is that even possible?”

  “Seems like it.” Coral laughed.

  “I don’t think that would work,” he said. “I’m flattered, but this game is demanding enough as it is.”

  They reached the top of Aga’s makeshift stairs. Grum’s face pressed against the bars, struggling to see who had assembled on the ground below.

  “Grum?” Coral asked.

  “That’s me,” he said. “Did I hear…”

  “Aga,” Coral said. “She’s outside. We need to get you out of here.”

  “Impossible,” Grum said.

  “Hurry!” Aga pleaded from below, her voice choking up. Coral felt the mud steps beneath her begin to shake.

  Coral reached her hand through the metal bars and grabbed onto Grum’s wrist. “Come with me,” she said. She tried to pull Grum toward her, but the bars blocked his exit. Coral couldn’t Shiftwalk him out of there.

  “What do we do?” she asked, as Aga’s mud platform shook violently underfoot.

  “Out of MP!” Aga yelled. Twenty-six flights of dirt staircase turned on their side and formed a long, smooth stretch that sent Sal sliding toward the ground. As he sped along the muddy slide, it collapsed behind him.

  Grum held one of Coral’s arms while she gripped the stone window frame with her free hand. Blat clung to her leg as Grum helped pull her up into the window, her body passing through the metal without feeling it. Blat was left behind for a moment, clutching the bars from the outside, before Coral and Grum helped him squeeze his small frame through the space between the bars.

  “Grum,” she said, getting to her feet inside the prison cell. “I can make you a belt that will get us through the metal bars. It’s sort of cursed, but—”

  “No,” Grum said. “Can’t go alone.” He marched forward. The window Coral had walked through was only a few inches from the floor. From inside, it looked more like a drainage grate than a proper window. The ceiling hung low at first, but suddenly disappeared, suggesting they had entered a much larger room. Grum’s footfalls echoed in the dark.

  Coral followed him, until a whoosh of flame shot across the room, lighting a small torch along the wall. In that burst of light, Coral saw that the prison cell was three stories high, formed by destroying the ceiling above, and the ceiling above that, to create a holding pen large enough for the creature that sat before her.

  “Well, well, well,” it said in a smooth, honeyed voice from above. “What to do with you?”

  It was a dragon black as night and twenty feet high. She didn’t look happy.

  29

  “Aga is here to rescue us!” Grum said.

  “Then go,” the dragon replied, snorting and turning her head. A small tuft of flame erupted from her wide nostrils and quickly vanished.

  “I won’t leave my friend here to rot in jail,” Grum said. “You don’t deserve this, let’s go!”

  “You must be Embra,” Coral said.

  “If my reputation precedes me,” the dragon said, “you must be very, very afraid.”

  “All I know about you is your name,” Coral said, “and that you’ve been trapped down here for a long time.”

  “Yes,” Embra said, “which means you came to take him away and leave me to rot alone down here.”

  Coral felt a quest coming on. If freeing Embra and Grum netted two separate rewards, all the better.

  “Very well,” Embra said. “I have been alone before.”

  “Embra,” Grum pleaded. The dragon looked down at the green man, but then looked away. She seemed sad to watch him leave, but too proud to say it.

  Why are you imprisoned here?” Coral asked, hoping to trigger the quest she assumed was buried down here with the dragon.

  Embra snorted a long thin spout of fire through her nostrils and reared back, laughing. “Because humans fear what they can’t control. And I would not be controlled! Travail was our home first. The ancients walked the land, the water, and the air. But then the lice came.”

  “Lice?” Coral asked.

  “That’s what I call you,” Embra said, “and the orcs, and the elves. All of you small, soft creatures with your delicate egos and insatiable hungers. You infested our beautiful world and made it dirty.

  “We tolerated you at first,” she continued. “Some of us even treated you as equals!” She laughed again. “I knew better. I kept my distance. Then the lice started killing my kind, one by one. Tearing apart our corpses and using us for parts. Potions, armor, food. It was like the gods put us here so you could farm us.”

  “I got fed up. We are not just sentient, we are majestic! I wanted my home back, I wanted to delouse Travail. My first move was, perhaps, too bold. I attacked Havenstock’s castle and tried to eat your king. If you could eat the flesh of the cerberus, certainly I could snack on a silly monarch. I was foolish to attack alone. The humans banded together and overpowered me. I’ve never seen humans united so strongly before, or after, as that day. I underestimated you lice.

  “I was so weak after that battle that King Frederic could have killed me himself, and he was no great swordsman. He would have leveled up quite a bit. Instead he put me here. I saw the sadness in his eyes. He regretted what his people did to my kind, but he couldn’t stop it. The thirst for dragon blood and pegasus wing was too strong. Lice only stop sucking when the host is dry.

  “Then Grum arrived. How ironic that he almost succeeded where I had failed. He sank his teeth into King Frederick’s neck. Even though he was drugged out of his mind at the time, I respected that. It has been an unlikely friendship, but one I value.”

  “I always wondered why they imprisoned you,” Grum said. “Why didn’t you tell me before now?”

  “It was not a proud moment,” Embra said. “Besides,
how could I tell you that I was guilty of the very crime you were falsely imprisoned for?”

  “That must have been centuries ago,” Coral said.

  “Many,” Embra said. “And for hundreds of years since, I have suffered that fool Harold. He provided me offerings of gold and fine wine; he threatened to skin me alive; he promised that his people would build a temple and treat me like a god; he offered to share the throne. He tried everything he could to garner my cooperation, but I always declined.”

  “Cooperation with what?” Coral asked.

  “He is a child in need of supervision. He comes to me for advice, which I often give and he always ignores. Well, almost always. There was a time he came to possess a vial of Thanaker’s Mark. I told him that liquid would bring nothing but his own ruination and he should offload it at his first opportunity. It was the truth, but I didn’t care much what he did either way. His ruin would only turn the throne over to another sadistic louse.

  “Otherwise, he wanted me to advise him how to destroy the other races and rule the world. I couldn’t have that. The only thing that keeps your populations down is endless war with each other. No race but the ancients should rule, and I consider anything that kills lice to be a boon.”

  “And Grum?” Coral asked. “Isn’t he a louse too?”

  “Perhaps my perspective is shifting,” she said. “Slowly. As regards ogres specifically.”

  “How did Harold expect you to help him if you were locked up in here?” Coral asked.

  “Dragons have truesight,” she said, “not that you would know the first thing about the ancients. He promised to free me if I used my talents on his behalf. I, of course, refused. Then he offered me another opportunity at parole, more insulting than the first. He wanted my egg.”