A Slave in the Locked Lands

by Arthur Stone

  “Are you planning to search the hall?” asked Danger Babe.

  “Of course. But without the company of minors this time. Get on with it already.”

  There were no secret caches in the hall. There weren’t any minerals, either, except for alabaster—a low-level and inexpensive resource that was nonetheless heavy and bulky. It could not be used for the manufacturing of weapons or armor, either. The only things made of alabaster were statues, decorative vases, and other ornamental objects for mansions, clan castles, and city squares. Powdered, it was used in alchemy, and also for polishing certain gems and ornamental stones in the regular manner, without magical transmogrification. Ros decided that the cheap and bulky stuff wasn’t worth the space in his bag.

  The hall that used to be the boss’ lair had a complex shape, with lots of niches and short tunnels. Ros found a strange passageway at the end of one of them, which was clearly alien in nature. It wasn’t marked on Agythric’s map, either. There was a breach in the wall with a long and narrow passage behind it.

  Ros explored the first thirty feet or so, but found nothing of interest. He decided not to tempt fate—should he run into something mortally dangerous, no one would revive him.

  He returned and told Tangh about his find, but the tank wasn’t particularly interested. He also offered an explanation for the existence of an uncharted passageway. A series of major rockfalls must have affected these caves recently, which could be related to the breach in the wall around the Locked Lands, and even the death of the boss. There was no rubble to be seen, but the game wasn’t like real life, and could clean up after itself relatively quickly. Not in every case, though.

  Ros found nothing worthy of his attention or a tap of the pickaxe, so he sat down next to Tangh with his back against the wall, and quickly fell asleep—without any dreams, which was how it happened in the game. Apart from the special dreams, of course. The odd ones. The ones that would shed light on the events of the nearest future.

  Ros only saw them twice in the course of the game.

  * * *

  He jumped up as he awoke—that was how his interface settings were configured. An attack on the pet, or the pet’s attack on someone, would set off a whole bunch of alarms.

  The shadowcrawler patriarch raised from a Soul Crystal was fighting a group of strange creatures. As a matter of fact, there was nothing strange about them—Ros had seen plenty of skeletons, within the game as well as in his former world. But he never saw those bony objects move on their own, let alone wear armor and shields, wield different weapons, or have their eye sockets glow crimson.

  “Undead creature: Skeleton. Aggression: varies. Sociality: varies. Level: 124. Skill: varied. Stats: varied.”

  There were four skeletons, and they were all attacking the shadowcrawler, who fought back furiously, having already lost more than half his HP. As soon as Ros jumped up, he ordered the pet to activate mass Sleep, but that only stopped a single skeleton. The undead were notoriously resistant to crowd control.

  He cast his shield and a healing spell, followed by another and yet another. With a better staff, Ros would have been able to do it in just two spells, but he had to make do with what was available.

  Tangh didn’t move. He may have failed to set up alarms in his interface, or was simply browsing the forum. Fortunately, the pet’s level was much higher than that of the attackers, and it dealt a lot more damage. Still, the fight was far from a cake walk for the shadowcrawler—the Bleedings inflicted by the edged weapons were particularly bothersome.

  Norder unfroze and jumped up just as the shadowcrawler was finishing off the last enemy. Tangh never got to the skeleton before it fell.

  “Ros! Where the hell did they come from? What were they doing here?”

  “I don’t have a clue.”

  “They dwell in necropolises and burial mounds. The undead need cursed land—they don’t wander about just everywhere. What are they doing in the mine?”

  “You’re asking me? Let’s check their footprints while they’re still fresh.”

  They tracked the footprints all the way back to the passageway found by Ros. They didn’t know what exactly that portended, but decided to place the shadowcrawler at the exit to stand guard.

  Another group of skeletons turned up right before dawn. There were six of them this time, but the result was the same—they all fell.

  They weren’t all that dangerous as adversaries, but they didn’t drop any trophies. Worse, he couldn’t even get a single Soul Crystal out of them. The undead must have possessed no soul.

  In the morning, when Danger Babe arrived, Tangh made a rather uncanny proposal.

  “You know, there was this game I played a long time ago. What you would normally do there if you didn’t want to walk too far or waste an expensive scroll was this: let the mobs kill you and send you to the bind point. It will take us a whole day to return, maybe even longer. And right next to us is a passageway no one’s ever explored. Even Agythric’s map doesn’t indicate anything of this sort. And we have seen skeletons appear from it. We might try letting them kill us—we’ll save a lot of time this way.”

  Ros shrugged.

  “I don’t care either way. We just have to remember to choose the lowest setting for our sensory perception in the menu. That way, we won’t have to suffer unnecessarily.”

  “We’ll lose some XP,” Danger Babe looked crestfallen.

  “We’ll get it back in a lot less than a day as we mine for gold and kill mobs while we’re at it,” said the norder.

  “What if we lose some of our stuff? We have a few expensive ones now, after all. Would be a shame to lose them.”

  “Ros said his chances of losing items are infinitesimal. Let’s give everything to him. There is a risk, but we haven’t got that many expensive items. How many have you got? Two or three? That’s nothing. If you’re really unlucky and lose something, it’s more likely to be cheap junk. In the worst case scenario, we can always return and pick it up.”

  “All right, let’s do it. I don’t want to lose a whole day, either. I want to be done with this quest already—Agythric might offer something better afterwards.”

  The narrow passageway was some fifteen hundred feet long and led to a gallery that was clearly artificially made—it was unnaturally straight, with nothing but darkness in either direction. Ros crouched, touched the grooves in the rock, and said:

  “This looks just like a mine. A proper mine. These parallel grooves are used by carts.”

  “Is there anything on the map?” Tangh asked.

  “Nothing at all. Complete darkness. Unchartered territory. I’ve never seen anything like it. Actually, no, that’s not true. I have. In the Chaos dungeon, where I was the first visitor.”

  “That’s nice—you’ll get to raise your Cartography. Where do we go?”

  “Makes no difference to me. Let’s go left.”

  “You go first,” said Danger Babe. “Skeletons give me the heebie-jeebies. The undead are my least favorite mobs for grinding. Everything just looks too real, as if it’s actually happening. Hey, what’s that thing?”

  “The wreck of a mining cart. A very old one, too—it has nearly disintegrated.” Ros crouched and touched the remains of the cart. “Hot damn! It’s full of ore! Crystalite, no less!”

  “Is it valuable?”

  “It is, and very scarce, too. A single piece costs more than five hundred gold pieces, and there are sixty-four of them here.”

  “How many?! That’s around three and a half thousand in gold, isn’t it?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Ros! We should spend more time exploring instead of killing ourselves. We might find more. Shall we come back once we’re done with the quest?”

  “I’m not sure treasures like this are scattered all over the place. And I have a strange foreboding. It is telling me we should go back. I’ve come to trust my intuition, which means we shouldn’t linger here.”

  “We have to compl
ete the quest. Time is at a premium,” Tangh reminded.

  “All right. Let’s do it your way. But I don’t see any skeletons to kill us.”

  “They aren’t necessary,” Ros recollected his past adventures. “I used to kill myself by jumping off a cliff.”

  “There are no cliffs here.”

  “Skeletons!”

  “Where?!” Tangh and Danger Babe exclaimed in unison.

  “On their way here. I can hear them.”

  There were seven skeletons altogether. As soon as the bony warriors saw the party, they rushed toward their prey. Ros shut his eyes as a rusty battle-axe hit him in the head. He fell from the blow. Then there were a few more.

  “The Skeleton kills you. XP lost: 10.1% of the current value. Attention! Use scrolls and skills that lower the loss of experience upon death, or have players with high-level resurrecting skills help you. Attention! Another death may result in the loss of a level! You are resurrected at your current bind point: Locked Lands, Granite Wall Ridge, Rotten Canyon Mine. Current owner: variable. There is high likelihood of aggressive actions from monsters and players. It is not recommended to place your bind points in dangerous zones.”

  Ros thought the resurrection log looked a little odd. Then he realized what it was: the owner’s name. It used to be Agythric’s Gang, but now it was said to be “variable.”

  He turned toward the nearest wall and realized that the log was right. The mobs from the entourage of the mine’s owner were on their knees, timidly throwing surreptitious glances at the newcomers surrounding them. They were also mobs, and looked similar, but their ears were much larger, fleshy and triangular. They were less hirsute, and there was hardly any fur on their snouts. They may even have trimmed it.

  The new mobs wore shiny armour of white metal, and were all armed with short glaives. The weapons looked so fancy that one could see the high quality of the materials and craftsmanship from afar.

  Agythric stood on his knees, just like the rest of his gang, and one of the newcomers was twisting his ear. This mob had a name. It was Tardath Yrch. The owner of the mine suffered the humiliation in silence, and even tried to keep his face from looking too displeased.

  “Attention! You have found a named creature that has not yet been added to the world bestiary! This is your sixth named creature. You receive a reward: +25 to Vigor. You can receive the reward for discovering a new creature at the Academy of Magic.”

  Ros approached and started to eavesdrop at the monologue of the mob that was twisting the mine owner’s ear.

  “So, where is our copper, Agythric? Where’s our gold, Agythric? Where’s our iron, Agythric? Where’s our mercury, Agythric?”

  The mob diligently listed many more ores and minerals, some of which Ros had never encountered in this mine, before changing the topic slightly.

  “You weren’t made the mine overseer to do nothing but stuff your mouth and snore the time away. We need metal from this mine. But we’re not getting any. Why would that be, now?!”

  Agythric commenced a litany of excuses in the voice of a hapless schoolboy whose football just broke the glass in the window of the principal’s office.

  “The meat that we captured in the new lands is good for nothing. It cannot work. It just keeps dying and does nothing. The meat from our lands never goes underground. It is afraid.”

  “We sent you soldiers. Why didn’t you clear out the mine?”

  “There are horrible monsters in the mine. They kill soldiers easily.”

  “Imbecile! Retarded sow in pants! Stinky worm feed! Whoever told you to send soldiers one by one?!”

  “I am no warrior! I don’t know how many I should have sent!”

  Tardath grabbed him by the other ear and pulled so hard it was a miracle the thing stayed put.

  “You are stupid beyond all belief. You haven’t sent us any ore, and those soldiers perished because of you. You do nothing but eat and sleep, and the mine remains idle. We’re at war, so we need metal. Where is the metal? There is none. None whatsoever.”

  Ros decided this was a good moment as any to intervene.

  “I beg your pardon, but we do have some metal. A little. Me and my companions have brought some gold ore. A few hundred pieces.”

  Tardath turned around. That was when Ros realized whom he resembled. The leader of the mobs looked just like Master Yoda from an ancient space opera. However, the movie Yoda was kind-natured and wise. This one looked severe, and it was hard to judge his wisdom so far.

  “What’s this?! The meat was given leave to talk?”

  Overjoyed by the fact that his ears were no longer being ripped off, Agythric pattered hastily:

  “This is good meat. This meat brings ore. It’s good at it. And it finds yummy food in the mine, too.”

  “Didn’t you just tell me the new meat was good for nothing, all of them?”

  “Not all of them. Three of them are good meat. This one, and those two behind him.”

  “Have you brought gold?” Tardath sought to clarify.

  “We did.” We had to bring three hundred pieces each. Let me pay for everyone at once and round it up to a thousand. Would that be acceptable?”

  A surprised Tardath raised his eyebrow and pulled on Agythric’s ear again, making him rise.

  “Check it.”

  Agythric took all the ore, and nodded.

  “The meat isn’t lying. With what they brought before, this is exactly a thousand pieces.”

  “Quest completed: Slave in the Locked Lands. Quest success: 133.33%. Reward: 1,250,000 XP, +250 to reputation among Locked Lands slaveowners, +100 to reputation among Locked Lands mixed factions. You gain a level. You gain a level. Points left until the next level: 301,349. You have exceeded the quest quota and receive a bonus: +150 to reputation among Locked Lands mixed factions, 5 undistributed primary base stat points, 3 undistributed secondary base stat points, 1 undistributed auxiliary stat point. Attention! This is the first time in the history of Second World that the Slave in the Locked Lands quest was completed, and your group of three did it. You receive a bonus: +500 to reputation among Locked Lands mixed factions, +750 to reputation among Locked Lands slaveowners, 500,000 XP. You gain a level. Points left until the next level: 426,349.”

  “Ding!” Danger Babe squeaked.

  “Ditto,” said Tangh.

  Tardath fiddled with Agythric’s ear pensively, which was already half its former size, and then asked:

  “Why doesn’t the rest of the meat bring any ore?”

  “I wouldn’t know. This meat is strange. Not like the rest. I even gave them a map to the depths to see what would happen.”

  “You sent them to the terror of the mines? Where there’s nothing but death and regret of having ended up underground?”

  “I did.”

  “Your jokes are stupid. So, what was the result?”

  “The meat didn’t perish. Not once. The new meat dies strangely, but these didn’t even die that way.”

  “You think I don’t know this meat cannot be killed permanently?”

  “Forgive me! Of course, you do.”

  “So, the terror didn’t kill the meat?”

  “They did die. Just now. They ended up where the rest of the meat is sitting. But this is the first time—they never did it like that before.”

  “Actually, we did it voluntarily—to complete the quest faster,” Ros interjected.

  “What is this meat talking about?” asked Tardath, pulling ever harder on the ear.

  Agythric winced like a martyr and replied:

  “The meat is stupid. They claim to have killed the terror of the mine. Such funny meat.”

  “We have killed the Scrum Queen and the Shadow Demon. We didn’t manage to kill the Salt Mine Worm because it was already dead. So, we have managed it—and right on schedule, too.”

  “Look into my eyes, meat,” Tardath hissed.

  The mob held Ros’ gaze for a minute without saying a word, and then nodded.

 
“The meat isn’t lying. It has accomplished the task. The mine terror is no more. There will be no scrum invasions, for there is no one to spawn them. The Shadow Demon will no longer hunt our soldiers. And the Worm will swallow no more miners. This meat managed what you, Agythric, have failed to do. What does that make you?”

  “I am meat. I am but disgraceful meat. I am nothing but slime under your boots.”