Soulstone: Awakening (World of Ruul Book 1)

by J. A. Cipriano

  “Woah, hold up a second. I wonder if this will work as well as one we got from a, uh, live skeleton?” I said, kneeling down and picking up the skull as it rolled to my feet with the intention of showing it to Gereng and getting his opinion. However, as soon as I touched it, the item glowed with soft amber light and vanished.

  “You have acquired quest item, skeleton skull. It has been deposited in your quest items tab,” Elizabeth said, and as she spoke, an inventory window opened with the skeleton skull listed at the top. Well, that was cool. I always hated in games when quest items took up valuable inventory space. Yes, World of Warcraft, I’m looking at you.

  “What happened?” Two’ Manchu asked, staring at me with a curious look on his face.

  “The skull counted as a quest item. I guess we don’t actually have to kill monsters for the quest items. If we just find them, that’s good enough.” I sighed as the implications hit me. “Too bad there aren’t other players around. If there were, we could buy the rest of the stuff from them and be done before you could say, I totally banged a virtual reality chick.”

  “Firstly, don’t you talk about my Dora that way,” the barbarian said, shaking his head at me. “And secondly, that’s great to know! I mean, there has to be other people here right? We can’t be the only guys who got their brains stuck in a jar. I mean, if we are, that’s some fucked up shit, and I know my karma isn’t that bad.”

  I smirked. “Yeah, you’re right. There’s got to be other people here. I didn’t get to look around Ivan’s place much, but I’m sure he had more than a few brains in there. It’d be really stupid to charge us two idiots with saving the world from Maelstrom.”

  “Well, Ivan is kind of an idiot…” Two’ Manchu said, shrugging.

  “Yeah, but hopefully not just us. Hopefully, there’s some super soldiers out there with Chuck Norris skills, trying to get the rest of the soul stones,” I said, turning back to the wall and reaching out toward the sconce next to me. Like I’d thought there was an unlit torch in it. I snagged it and held it out to the barbarian. “Do you have one of those fire barbarian skills?”

  “Um, no. Those are all way higher level than me.” I’d expected him to look dismayed, but instead, his face lit up. “I did have max wilderness survival though, and all those skills were level one. I knew how to make a fire and shit.” He glanced around for a second looking for something. After a moment, his eyes widened, and he stared at the remains of the skeleton he’d kicked. Then he dropped down next to the pile of debris and ran his hands through it. Most of the creature’s clothing had disintegrated, but as he did it, ten of the twenty Rhuvians he’d found were automatically added to my wallet. “Dude, check out these bodies, maybe one of them has a flint we can use.”

  “Okay!” I said, doing as he asked. A few moments later, we’d found a few useless pieces of scrap and some more Rhuvians but nothing of much use. Everything in here had long since decayed into uselessness. As my initial excitement started to fade, Two’ Manchu let out an excited cry.

  “Look what I found!” he exclaimed, showing me a single wooden match. “We’re in the money!” He danced as he held the match out to me like he was showing me the Holy Grail.

  “You found one match? What if it doesn’t work?” I asked, watching him continue to dance in triumph.

  “Dude, max survival skills. I can light a fucking match.” He turned toward the wall, and with one flick of his wrist, struck it against the stone. The match flared to life, and then before I could say “Aardvark tomato” he held the flaming match out to the torch in the sconce above his head. As he touched the flame to it, the torch burst to life, filling the room with dancing, shadowy light. “Let there be fucking light!”

  As the barbarian celebrated, I touched the torch in my hand to the lit one on the wall. It burst into flames, giving me a source of light which was good because I’d nearly walked face first into a huge spider web, and if I had, I’d have freaked the fuck out. Like seriously. I’m a little girl when it comes to spiders, probably because when I used to take the trash out, half the time I’d walk into these huge spider webs that had magically appeared across the gate and would wind up having a spider the size of a quarter in my hair.

  “If you two girls are done messing around, I’d like to get out of here,” George said, and as I glanced at the bunny, he pointed across the way. I followed his gaze toward a group of old decrepit bookshelves situated along the far wall.

  Most of their shelves had long since broken under the weight of whatever had been on them, and the middle one had buckled into a barely distinguishable heap, which was good since it revealed a hidden passage behind. Sweet! Glee filled me as I stared at it. If those had been new, we might not have noticed the passage, let alone been able to move the shelves since they looked like they’d been anchored to the wall with iron bands as thick as my finger.

  “I wonder if these guys got stuck in here and couldn’t find the exit,” Two’ Manchu said, pulling his lit torch off the wall. “Because if that’s the case, it makes me wonder how long Ruul has been around because while I never thought about actually starving to death…” he waved off his train of thought. “I keep thinking it’s this new thing because it’s VR, but I remember reading about the Maelstrom a decade ago. What if there’s been people here that long? Maybe they’ve had VR the whole time, or maybe people just played with rigs like Ivan had. Hell, maybe there were people playing with a mouse and keyboard?”

  “I guess it’s possible,” I said as the barbarian moved to the unlit sconces and pulled the torches free. “There hasn’t been the technology to get us in here for that long, though, so if they had, it must have been with a mouse and keyboard or something. Still, it seems like we’d have known about it. Like why wouldn’t they release it to everyone like they did in Armada, and we’d secretly be trying to beat the maelstrom without even knowing it? That seems more likely, honestly. No, this transmutation of Ruul has to be fairly new.”

  “That’s what the man wants you to think,” Two’ Manchu said, and I got the distinct impression he was annoyed I wasn’t agreeing with him. As the last of the unlit torches disappeared into his inventory, he turned to George, a triumphant look in his eye. “Say, George, do you have any idea how old the game is?”

  “I’ve been around for about a week,” the bunny said like he was trying to be helpful and knew he wasn’t. “I have no idea how long the world existed before me. I know some other rabbits are a few months old.” He looked up at the ceiling like he was thinking. “The Cheshire cat in the woods is said to be a year old, but how can you trust a cat?”

  George’s words were interesting. If there was an NPC a year old, maybe Two’ Manchu was right. Maybe Ruul was a lot older than I thought it was? If so, why were they just now sending us in? No. Something was definitely not right. Worse, Two’ Manchu was right. I’d been hearing about the Maelstrom virus for a long time. It touched a special place in my heart because as an avid gamer, most of my past times were on the internet, and I didn’t want to see that get shut down by a virus.

  “Great, so you don’t know.” Two’ Manchu snapped, shaking his head at the bunny as dismay filled his features. “But you not knowing that doesn’t mean I’m not right. I mean, how long has Titan Gate been around, a few years, right? Ruul had to be around for a while before that for them to mock up a game…”

  “I’m failing to see your point,” I said, ignoring him as I batted away spider webs with my sword in an effort to cut myself a path to the bookcase. It was sort of working, but every time I moved, I felt like I had spiders crawling over me, which was about as far from awesome as one could get.

  “My point is that not only have people died here,” he gestured around the room, “but no one’s found all eight soul stones yet. In all that time. Hell, for all we know, no one’s even found one stone.”

  “Again, neither of those things are helpful,” I said, kneeling down beside the bookcase and rummaging around in the debris. Nothing jumped
out at me, which was both good and bad because there didn’t seem to be anything of value. Part of me wanted to search the corpses, and if this had been any other game, I probably would have, but as I actually had to do it with my hands instead of just clicking on their corpses, I didn’t really want to. Not, in a newbie dungeon like this, anyway. If this was a high level place, maybe there’d be a bunch of awesome stuff to find on dead adventurers.

  “That doesn’t concern you a little?” he asked as I stood and kicked the boards leading into the darkened room beyond. The boards snapped without much effort, leading me to believe he was right. They were way old. As dust and debris filled the air from the broken bookcase, I turned and looked at the barbarian.

  “Look, for one, even if that’s true, I am not going to impose other people’s limitations on myself. Just because no one has found all the soul stones, doesn’t mean I won’t. You can quote me odds and all that shit, but at the end of the day, I don’t care.” I made a fist and held it in front of myself. “I will not go quietly into the night. I will not take the easy way out and spend my time boffing virtual chicks until they unplug me. No, I will bite, and scratch, and if I have to, I will fucking crawl forward until I am the one standing atop this whole fucking world.”

  “Dude, calm down,” Two’ Manchu said, holding his hands up in surrender. “You don’t have to yell at me. I wasn’t trying to suggest we give up…”

  That’s when I realized how angry I was. My chest was heaving, and I felt my blood rushing through my veins. I always hated when people gave me reasons why I couldn’t win, why the deck was stacked against me, and you know, what? They were usually right. But I was Aaron fucking Hope, and I was fucking good at video games. It was the only thing I was good at, and this was another game. I would win because if I didn’t, it meant I wasn’t good enough at the one thing I was actually good at.

  No. That could not stand. It would not stand.

  “Whatever,” I snapped, shining my torch into the tunnel. The green stone shone under my dancing firelight, revealing a square room that ended in a steel dungeon door complete with bars. I wasn’t sure if it was locked or not, or if there were traps inside, but I suddenly didn’t care. I was getting out of here. This dungeon would be but a stepping stone on my path to victory.

  “Detect trap!” I snapped, sheathing my short sword and reaching out toward the darkened hallway with my outstretched hand. Nothing happened. “Detect trap!” I said, but this time I was louder, angrier.

  “Dude, maybe you chill out a bit,” Two’ Manchu said, coming up to me and putting a hand on my shoulder. “You seem kinda wiggy. I mean, there’s an actual vein bulging on your forehead.”

  “Detect fucking trap!” I screamed, putting all my will into it. Again nothing happened.

  “Um… I don’t think it’s going to work, boss,” George said, and there was a hesitation in his voice that should have concerned me, but just didn’t. I was too fucking pissed to care.

  The Detect Trap skill would tell me if the coast was clear or if there were traps. It wouldn’t just do nothing, which meant it wasn’t working. If it wasn’t working, that meant I wasn’t good enough. And that was not allowed. Not at this. I needed it to work. I needed to know I was good enough to win this fucking game because if I wasn’t, if I was really just that much of a loser, well, if that was really the case, then maybe I should just spend my time waiting to get unplugged. And that was just too pathetic to handle. No, that would not be me.

  “It will work!” I snarled, shutting my eyes and concentrating as hard as I could. The spell was low level in Titan Gate and was the primary reason people brought Rogues on hunts at all. Dungeons were notorious for being laden with traps.

  It had to fucking work, otherwise we risked stepping foot inside and getting gibbed. I wasn’t sure why I was so sure of that, but I was.

  I focused as hard as I ever had, more than I had when I failed my driving test because kids were running across the street, more than when I took my fundamentals of engineering exam, more than ever before.

  This time, I envisioned how the Detect Trap spell looked while mentally turning the entire room around in my mind. I spun it around, examined every last green stone, every nick in the iron bars. I breathed in the air, smelled the dust, the mold, the age. My eyes snapped open, and I stared outward into the room.

  “Detect trap,” I whispered, filling my voice with the result of all that focus as I reached out toward the room once more. This time, green light flitted across my outstretched hand and arced between my fingers before spreading out across the room in an emerald wave. As it moved, stones in the floor and walls lit up, revealing themselves to be traps.

  “You have learned the skill Detect Trap,” Elizabeth said, and as I glanced in the skill window, I realized it was highlighted in red which was probably why she hadn’t said it was available for use.

  “Elizabeth, why is the skill highlighted in red?” I asked aloud, even though I could have probably just thought the question.

  “Because you are too low level to use this skill. When you reach the appropriate level, you will be able to utilize it,” my HUD told me, and as I pulled up the skill in the window, I realized it was a level ten skill. No wonder it hadn’t been working. Only… it had worked. The traps had been detected, hadn’t they?

  “Who is Elizabeth?” Two’ Manchu asked, glancing at me as he stared at the still glowing trap stones. “And sorry for doubting you about the traps. Guess you were right.” He clapped me on the shoulder.

  “I switched my HUD from text to vocalization. I commanded it to talk like Elizabeth Hurley so I started calling her Elizabeth.” I shrugged at him, and he grinned from ear to ear.

  “That’s a great idea! I’m gonna make mine talk like Jenna Jameson!” He gave me a smug expression. “Don’t judge. She’s a tremendous actress.”

  “I’m not judging,” I replied, unable to keep from smiling at the idea of Jenna Jameson telling him he’d leveled up.

  “Good because we’re in this together, and I’d hate to think you didn’t totally respect Jenna.” He nodded at me, and for a second I considered telling him what was going on with the skills, but decided I didn’t want to get into it with him right now. Still, it was curious. The game had literally bent to my will. If it had done so once, would it do so again?

  I wasn’t sure, but I suddenly felt like I hadn’t been imaginative enough so far in exploiting the game. So far, I’d just used skills from Titan Gate, and while my Homing Arrow had been taken from Diablo III, it’d worked because there was a similar spell here, but now I’d used a skill I should not have been able to use.

  I knew part of my hang up was because the world felt so similar to the game world that I’d naturally gravitated back into my role as a rogue. Ostensibly, I was sure that was why I’d been recruited to go into Ruul and save the world because on most levels it didn’t make much sense to have me here at all.

  Why wouldn’t you send in trained soldiers? Or people who had studied the game to the T? Why send me in with almost no knowledge, where I had to discover everything like it was a fucking sandbox? It didn’t make sense, unless that was the point. Maybe the game’s rules could be bent just because I didn’t know them. Hell, maybe they could be broken.

  Maybe by not telling me anything about the game, I’d been handed the equivalent of nanobots capable of building anything I wanted, and so far, all I’d done was use them to build a shovel?

  23

  As I stood there staring at the trap-filled corridor and thinking about how to exploit my newfound hypothesis of the world of Ruul, George tugged hard on my pant leg.

  “What is it?” I asked, glancing at the bunny. “I’m trying to figure something out.”

  He gave me a weird look and more intelligence than I’d ever seen from the rabbit flashed through his eyes. “Hey, boss, you know, if I were you, I might try not to exploit what you think you know because if I was an AI system capable of creating a world like this, I mi
ght not take kindly to people fucking with it. No, I might start to think that someone abusing a bug might need to be banned, and while I’m not sure what happens to users when they get banned, I’m sure it’s not fun.”

  “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” I asked, staring at the bunny and wondering if he could read my mind. If he could, that was ten times of creepy, and more than a little horrible. Unfortunately, as I spoke, the strange intelligence vanished from the rabbit’s eyes, and I found myself looking at George once again.

  “Are you talking to me, boss?” George inquired, confusion flashing across his face.

  “No one said anything,” Two’ Manchu said, clapping me on the shoulder. “Did using the Detect Trap skill pop a vessel in your brain or something? You’ve been standing there staring into space for the last couple minutes. I figured you were just looking at your skill window, but now I’m kind of worried. Did you say it was red?”

  “No,” I shook my head as I swallowed hard. “Sorry, I was just a bit confused.” I rubbed my temples as I processed what had just happened. George had spoken to me about exploiting, but didn’t seem to remember it. Worse, Two’ Manchu hadn’t even heard the bunny tell me to stop. Had the Maelstrom just warned me to behave like a good little boy?

  I wasn’t sure, but as I stared at the red skill in my inventory window, the name changed from Detect Trap to Detect Lesser Traps with a level seven requirement next to it and the red text changed to white. Interesting. Was the AI giving me a carrot? If it was, I did not want to know what happened if I got the stick. Something told me I might not live through it.

  “You were confused?” Two’ Manchu asked, raising an eyebrow at me. “What exactly is confusing about learning a skill?”

  “I was confused because I thought I’d learned Detect Trap, but I’m not high enough to learn that skill. Instead, I guess I learned Detect Lesser Traps, which is a prerequisite skill I’d forgotten about because almost no one uses it during high-end play…”I shrugged at him. “Anyway, let’s get through this dungeon and get back to town. Real or not, I need a beer.”