Citadel of Smoke: A LitRPG and GameLit Adventure (Stonehaven League Book 4)

by Carrie Summers

  Quest updated: Prove your worth.

  Additional Reward: Having devoted her life to Veia and the goddess’s ministry, Shavari knows quite a lot about the ancient seats of Veian power. She wasn’t surprised by your talk of the relics. Assuming you did plan to continue your search for the remaining two, Shavari has much guidance to offer.

  Devon almost groaned. It seemed she was going to have to prove her worth to this woman whether she cared to or not.

  “Well, I guess I’ll add finding a way to prove myself to my list of tasks.”

  Shavari nodded. “You wouldn’t happen to have guest accommodations in this Stonehaven settlement, would you?”

  Devon glanced at Hazel. They’d planned an overnight trip as part of their investigation into the corrupted awakening stones. But at this point, she kind of just wanted to get home.

  The scout shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind getting back to Zoe sooner.”

  Devon gestured toward the southern edge of the small clearing. “Let’s head back then. We can find a spare room somewhere in the hamlet, I’m sure.”

  Chapter Five

  “AND?” HAILEY ASKED as Chen materialized near the bow of the ship. “How was calculus?”

  Chen snorted. “I finished level 3 calc in the summer semester.”

  Hailey grimaced. “You have to go to school in the summer, too?”

  “Seriously, you don’t understand my parents. If they could make me go to school in my sleep, they would.”

  A dark look crossed Chen’s face as he finished speaking. Hailey suspected the flip remark had reminded him of the same issue that it had recalled for her. Namely, Devon’s claim that some other AI had mistakenly been given access to players’ sleeping brains and had used them to help create demonic content. That was why Devon’s in-game avatar had fallen unconscious during the demon attack on Stonehaven. Her mind had been co-opted to run the leader of the demon attack, a war priestess she’d apparently been controlling in her sleep.

  Hailey shuddered at the thought, partly because she might never know what sorts of things—if any—her own sleeping mind had been doing.

  “Homework’s done though, right?” she said, nodding at the coast that was now within a few minutes’ sail. As they’d drawn nearer, she could see that a number of ships were tied up to piers that jutted from the shore. Though it was difficult to make out details, she spotted movement on the decks, a sure sign of habitation.

  “Economics report finished, and I finished up schematics for Advanced Robotics. Oh, and I uploaded a crappy poem that my English teacher is going to call brilliant because it doesn’t make sense.”

  Hailey smirked. “Then let’s go conquer a continent.”

  She grabbed the main sheet, the coarse rope biting into her calluses, and pulled slack from the sail. The boat heeled harder, and the deck hummed beneath her feet as the vessel cut through the wavelets rippling the surface. Atop the mast, a pennant snapped in the wind.

  Their destination was a shallow bay lined by what looked like a humble fishing community—though the piers a short distance north looked sturdy, she didn’t want to assume they’d allow a strange vessel to tie up. Better to drop anchor in the bay and row ashore until they’d contacted the locals. With good fortune, that wouldn’t take too long; though the anchorage offered some protection from storms—the southern arm of the bay wrapped until it was parallel from the coast, providing a serviceable breakwater—Hailey doubted that a ship of their size would be safe in angry seas. But that was a concern for later. Right now, the priorities were dropping anchor, rowing to the beach, and becoming the first players to discover a new land.

  As the small vessel passed the most seaward point of land, coming into the bay at an angle to the shore, Hailey heard the first sounds of habitation. Metal clanged. From behind some of the structures lining the shore came the disconcerting cries of goats. Hailey grimaced at the reminder of how the animals often sounded like screaming humans.

  She turned the wheel hard to port and brought the little ship about, aiming for the most sheltered part of the anchorage. Once the tack was complete, she let some slack into the sail to slow their movement. After days spent journeying, she wanted to savor the moment.

  Congratulations! You have discovered the continent of Jiankal!

  Once home to many of Aventalia’s most advanced societies, the continent unfortunately fell to dark forces around five decades ago. Tread carefully, adventurer, for within Jiankal’s heart the most powerful of the demon horde have torn gates between the planes and pass freely between realms.

  Or better yet, don’t tread here at all.

  You receive 115000 experience!

  Congratulations! You have reached Level 19!

  “Uh, Hailey?” Chen was slowly backing away from the front of the ship.

  Hailey sighed. That hadn’t sounded good, but Chen’s complaining was starting to get to her. “What?” she snapped. “Okay, so maybe we’ll have to fight a few demons if we try to go too far inland. But at least we’ll have an easy time getting XP.”

  The knight shook his head. “Look dead ahead.”

  As Hailey focused past the prow of the ship, taking in the shore and the shallows before it, her stomach gave a sick churn. When steering into the bay, she’d taken the dark humps on the sand as piles of seaweed abandoned by the tide. Clearly that wasn’t the case, as they were now moving, crawling over the shore with agonized motions. Limbs splayed crookedly as the figures, which she now recognized as human—or as having once been human—attempted to drag themselves toward the sea.

  More shrieking cries pierced the air. Abruptly, Hailey realized she hadn’t been hearing goats after all. The crippled people on the shore screamed in horror as menacing figures stepped from the gaps between buildings. Demons roared, their eyes flashing, as they descended on the struggling people. Talons slashed through ragged clothes and flayed emaciated flesh.

  But none delivered a killing blow. For the most part, the monsters towered over their victims and watched, seeming to take pleasure in the humans’ painstaking crawl for the sea.

  “I think…” Chen shuddered. “I think the people are trying to drown themselves.”

  Hailey swallowed back her rising gorge. “I think you’re right.”

  “Up for a rescue?” Chen asked, drawing his sword.

  Hailey gave Chen a pointed up-and-down look. The teenager glanced down at his avatar’s body and blushed. Barefoot, he was wearing nothing but a pair of chainmail pants with the ankle cuffs pulled up over his thighs to convert them into shorts. The under-armor vest he’d been wearing for most of the trip had even disappeared into his inventory after he’d announced that he intended to get a tan on the “most boring voyage ever known in gaming.”

  Setting his sword on a crate, he dragged the rest of his armor out of his bag—a slight break in realism as a rigid breastplate and helm emerged from a battered leather backpack—and donned them.

  Hailey nodded. “All right. Yes, now I’m up for a rescue.”

  A few minutes ago, she’d intended to slow the ship and drop anchor, preserving the vessel for further coastline exploration. But even though they were just NPCs, the suffering on the shore had flipped something over in her brain. Taking a firm grip on the wheel, she pointed the boat straight for the rocky beach.

  “Brace yourself,” she said. “We’re running aground.”

  Chapter Six

  EMERSON STRUGGLED TO meet the eyes of the women who joined him at the small conference table in E-Squared headquarters. Penelope, the other AI programmer, seemed to feel the same, but then again, she’d always been a little twitchy with eye-contact. In contrast, Miriam, the engineer from Entwined, was staring at him and Penelope in turn. Emerson wanted to lash out, mentioning that she could show a little contriteness, considering that the undocumented API in the Entwined implants was the reason they’d ended up in this mess.

  But that wasn’t the only reason. Penelope
had been careless in using the API, thinking she could gain more processing power to achieve the AI performance their CEO had demanded. And the CEO was at fault because he’d threatened Penelope’s job unless she worked a performance miracle.

  On top of that, the corporate culture of ignoring problems and mistakes had led to an environment where no one had felt comfortable raising red flags. Customer service had known about the pain sensitivity, the first hint that the Zaa AI had been tampering with players’ unconscious minds, but no one had stuck their neck out about it.

  Sometimes, Emerson tried to tell himself that he was one of the only people who wasn’t at fault, but that was wrong too. Rather than assume Penelope was acting maliciously, a conclusion he’d drawn the moment he understood what Zaa had done, he could have just approached her and asked.

  But he hadn’t, and that was because of yet another lie. The company CEO, Bradley Williams, had told him there was a deliberately constructed competition between the AIs, designed to create better content through the rivalry. There hadn’t been, and it seemed everyone but Emerson had known.

  Which raised the question: what about Emerson’s personality had convinced Bradley that the imaginary competition was the best way to motivate his efforts on developing Veia? Was Emerson so insecure that he’d needed to “beat” Penelope? Or was he just lazy if there wasn’t some external challenge?

  Regardless, Emerson had to admit at least partial fault for the Zaa issue. Sometimes, he wondered whether he’d be living with the guilt forever. The answer to that question probably depended on what he and the other two programmers worked out to solve the problem.

  “I don’t know,” Miriam said. “It seems cruel, doesn’t it? Sure, Devon’s technically our employee, but does that mean we have the right to ask her to do this?”

  Emerson swallowed. Lately, Devon had felt like more than an employee to him. At the very least, he now considered her a friend. It tore him up inside to consider asking her to put her conscious mind into a demonic avatar. The results of Entwined’s tests on the process were frankly terrifying. Over the past couple weeks, the minds of consenting beta testers had been briefly assigned to Zaa’s control channels rather than Veia’s. The players had reported unsettling emotional shifts that—according to the system designs—shouldn’t even be possible. Regardless of the AI assigned to crafting a user’s experience, the inputs were supposed to be restricted to sensory simulation. The internal state of an individual—a collection of their emotions, needs, and wants—was, by design, sacrosanct. Unfortunately, bugs in the implants’ code were violating this mandate.

  The long-term solution was to patch the implants’ code to remove functionality that allowed emotional and subconscious access. But they couldn’t do that until they fully understood the side-effects of withdrawal in players who had been exposed to Zaa’s influence.

  And in cases like Owen Calhoun, lying unconscious because—they theorized—Zaa had fully taken control of his mind, an abrupt disconnect might be crippling.

  Or fatal.

  Emerson dragged his hands through his hair. “How certain are we that strong-willed players can resist Zaa’s impulses? She’ll be able to keep a grasp on her personality, right? That’s why she’s the ideal candidate.”

  “Well, plus she knows the Calhoun kid and actually has a reason to want to help him. But yes, given what you’ve said about Devon, I think she can keep her self-awareness intact,” Miriam said. “We’ve seen strong resistance in some test cases. The subjects report feeling the urge to—as some describe it—rage and rampage, but they’re able to compartmentalize Zaa’s influence. Basically, they describe playing the game as a demon, with sensory information filtered through the demon’s perception and impulses matching a demonic mental state. But the stronger test subjects report confidence in their ability to resist those impulses. A few even seemed to enjoy the challenge.”

  Emerson grimaced. Was it an indication of deviance to enjoy such an experience? Or maybe it indicated a predilection toward zealotry, some fascination for fighting a literal demon. For all he knew, some of those beta testers might break their NDAs and start cults. Or maybe he was overreacting, the situation having put him in an anxious state of mind.

  He sighed. “Then I think we should go ahead. We need someone to get in there and reason with Owen, guiding him back to himself. Devon’s the best candidate we have.”

  “So you’ll talk to her?” Penelope asked, eyes still downturned. Emerson felt a twinge of pity. Some mornings, guilt made it hard for him to crawl out of bed. No doubt Penelope felt a thousand times worse.

  “I’ll head to St. George tonight. I think this is a conversation that should happen in person.”

  Miriam’s lips twitched in a knowing smile. “Of course. In person is the only way.”

  Chapter Seven

  HAILEY’S MANA WAS at twenty percent. A few paces away, Chen fought on, bleeding from slashes where talons and ragged weapons had sliced through his chainmail and into the flesh beneath. Around the knight, a circle of demons howled and gibbered, some with eyes glowing a smoldering red. They worked in concert, luring Chen’s attention forward while attackers darted in and struck blows from the knight’s flanks.

  Until now, almost all the demons Hailey had encountered had been stupid, attacking without concern for defense or tactics. The only other time she’d seen this sort of coordination was when Devon, playing as the demon war priestess, Ezraxis, had led an attack on Stonehaven. Either there was another warlord near, or the demon horde as a whole was growing in power.

  She cast another Guide Vitality, golden-white light streaming from her hands to Chen’s body. The energy sank through his armor and skin, glowing faintly in the hollows of his face and gaps of his armor with each pulse of the heal over time effect. The flow of blood momentarily lessened, but it wouldn’t be enough to stop the slow but steady fall of his health bar.

  They weren’t going to win this. She shook her head. Days of in-game sailing only to die ten feet from the shore where they’d made landfall.

  Hailey had a few choice words for Veia, and none of them were appropriate to say over her livestream. She’d worked hard to earn a Teen approval rating from COSUG, the Coalition for Safe User-streamed Gaming. Hailey wasn’t about to lose her credentials just because the creator AI was a jerk.

  And anyway, it was partly her own fault for being willing to take the long boat ride into the unknown. She just hadn’t expected the far shore to, apparently, be a raid-level zone.

  Another demon burst from the edge of the fishing village, ragged wings beating the air and lightening its steps. The beast howled and focused on Hailey. The fleshy flaps covering its gums—she wouldn’t be so generous as to say it had lips—pulled back in a savage snarl, baring yellow teeth streaked with black.

  “Add,” Hailey said.

  Chen just shook his head. “I don’t think I can grab—”

  A massive swipe from one of his current attackers sent him staggering as it dented the backplate on his armor.

  Hailey nodded, backstepping as she tried to target the newcomer with a Charm spell. The beast resisted, shrieking in rage as the spell hit its flesh and fizzled. It activated some sort of Sprint skill and was on her in less than a second.

  Chen shouted in frustration as the demon’s talons ripped through Hailey’s cloth sleeve and opened her arm to the bone.

  “Not your fault,” Hailey yelled. Chen wasn’t even a tank spec, but the five years he’d spent as the main tank for their party had ingrained the sense of responsibility in him. It was honestly a miracle that he’d managed to keep the demons off her for this long. “I dragged you all the way out here—”

  Another attack hit her leg, the demon’s spiked tail severing tendons behind her knee. Hailey toppled and raised her staff to defend her body. Helpless to get out of the demon’s range, she craned her neck to look out to sea. A handful of corpses bobbed on the light waves that rippled the surfac
e. At least she and Chen had accomplished that much, buying the tortured humans enough time to crawl into the water and drown as an escape from their captors.

  Hailey turned back in time to see the demon lifting a massive pike over her body. The spear came down fast, plunging through her rib cage.

  She closed her eyes as the weapon pierced her heart.

  You have been slain by a Demon Ravager.

  Respawning…

  Chapter Eight

  “HAVE YOU PUT any thought into where you’ll find a mentor to continue your training?” asked Hezbek, the medicine woman and retired sorceress who had taught Devon until now.

  “I guess I’ll have to figure that out once I level again.”

  Hezbek sighed. “I suppose you could procrastinate until then…”

  “It’s worked for me so far, right?”

  “You didn’t have much motivation to change tactics when I was able to supply your training.”

  Devon sighed. “I was kind of hoping the Teleport spell you taught me after we returned from the mountains would spare me the need to travel in search of a teacher.”

  Hezbek chuckled. “Maybe someday you’ll find a mentor who can teach you such things. For now, you’ll have to be content to transport your party to your current binding location or bindstones you’ve personally visited.”

  “And it won’t work if enemies are nearby. And I can only do it once every three days.” Devon squinted toward the main gates of Stonehaven where a player was bringing in a cart filled with limestone rubble. Blackbeard the Parrot hopped over to the newcomer and squawked.

  “Awwwk! Heave ho, scallywag!”

  The player rolled her eyes and continued trudging forward.

  Hezbek exhaled and crossed her legs. She poked at the grass with a walking stick she’d taken to using while moving about the settlement. Devon wasn’t sure whether it was a prop, calculated to give the medicine woman the appearance of a wise old sage, or whether she was having a harder time walking lately. Devon hadn’t asked because she wasn’t sure she wanted the answer. In Relic Online, just like in life, she imagined that NPCs eventually grew old and died. She couldn’t think about that happening to Hezbek.