Devon stretched out her hand. The dwarf’s large, callused palm swallowed it up.
“Consider it a deal,” she said. They finished up the trade, gaining Devon a skill point in Bartering. She grinned as she pulled the steel dagger out of her bag. The hilt settled easily into her palm—already it felt more comfortable than the machete. Plus, she could start working on that One-handed Piercing skill.
“When Hazel returns, we plan to inspect a couple sites where we can lay down foundations for the settlement. Care to join? It would be nice if we were close.”
“I’d greatly enjoy that, lass.”
***
The first site Hazel had found had a nearby spring and good access to fruit-bearing trees, but it didn’t offer much in the way of natural defense. The second option, however, put a grin on Devon’s face the moment she stepped into the glade.
Unlike the rest of the jungle, the trees here grew sparsely. Dappled sun glinted off a stream that burbled through the center of the proposed site, but the real treat was at the back edge of the area where a rib of stone erupted from the jungle floor. The cliff face was semicircular, wrapping the glade in sheltering arms. On the inside perimeter, a rudimentary stone ramp provided access to potential lookout points up top, but the other aspects—according to Hazel who had scouted the entire base of the escarpment—would be very difficult to climb. The cliff would provide a sturdy backrest for the village without placing anyone in danger from being attacked by assailants on the high ground. It was a slightly longer journey from the quarry, but closer to some of the ruins marked on the map. And with dense trees surrounding the area, Henrik’s people would have to either be very persistent or very lucky to find them.
Devon looked to Dorden who had both fists around his beard as he contemplated. “What do you think?”
A slow smile cracked the dwarf’s face. “And here I thought all the rock around this area was limestone. Fine for building, rubbish for extracting ores. But that there is fine granite. I can almost smell the glimmer of gold and iron down in that cliff’s belly.”
Devon raised an eyebrow. She wasn’t sure she wanted an open mine right inside the village, but they could talk about that later. Besides, where there was one outcrop, there were likely more. “We can site the boundaries of our respective camps later, don’t you think?”
The dwarf nodded. “I don’t expect to have problems. I’ve got to say, this looks like home to me.”
Hazel was nearly bouncing with pride, and Devon took the time to congratulate the woman. They turned back toward the future quarry to tell the others. Just as the jagged top of the quarry’s stone showed between the trees, a snort shook the bushes. A boar leaped out, normal-sized without red eyes. Dorden yelled and brandished his hammer.
“Keep his attention,” Devon said. “But see if you can avoid bludgeoning it to inedibility.”
The dwarf laughed as he shouted in the wild pig’s face. The beast snorted again and attacked in a sweeping motion with its tusks. The boar’s head glanced off iron plates fastened over the dwarf’s thighs.
Devon couldn’t help grinning. It had been a long time since she’d fought with a tank holding a monster’s attention. She circled around behind the squealing hog and leaped, plunging her new dagger into the back of its neck. The boar squealed as blood spurted, but it didn’t drop. Dorden delivered a kick to the thing’s head, knocking it to the side. The beast’s neck cracked, but it didn’t seem broken. Its health fell to 30%. Spotting an opening, Devon leaped in and dragged the razor edge of her new weapon across the hog’s throat. The beast fell over dead, and she knelt to activate looting.
“Looks like we’ve earned ourselves a pig roast tonight,” she said.
The corpse decomposed into a Hog Carcass and a Boar Pelt – Fair.
“Want the pelt?” Devon asked.
He shook his head. “All I want is the grub.”
Devon didn’t even try to fit the carcass into her bag. She could scarcely lift it. After staggering forward under its weight, she handed off the meat with relief. Dorden snorted in amusement as he carried it back to the quarry with one arm.
As they joined the others, Devon glanced at her clock. It was mid-afternoon in game, but almost dawn in St. George, Utah. Devon couldn’t stay online any longer. Distantly, she felt the fatigue and hunger of her neglected body. She made arrangements with the dwarves and her followers. Deld and Bern could start quarrying stone and preparing mortar right away. Meanwhile, Hazel would lead half the dwarves on a straight march back to the camp where they would invite everyone to follow them back to the quarry for a bonfire and celebration. Devon made sure to give Hazel instructions for Tom, the cook. Whatever magic he might be able to work on the roast pig would be greatly appreciated. Tonight, the tribe could sleep in the caves. It wouldn’t be as comfortable as their huts and cots, but now that they’d identified their future home, the site where she would grow their settlement into a community, and maybe even a society… She didn’t see any reason to remain in the small circle hacked from the jungle by Uruquat.
She left instructions for them to start ferrying personal possessions and camp supplies to the new site, under guard of the fighters and dwarves. By the time Henrik’s people arrived, if they did manage to find her new camp, they’d meet stiff resistance to any attempts to mess with her tribe.
Satisfied, Devon trudged back toward one of the caves. The others seem to understand that her starborn nature meant she needed to vanish from the world from time to time. Either that or they didn’t want to offend her by asking. In any case, she slumped onto her bedroll and stared at the ceiling, listening to the laughter from outside as humans and dwarves set about their tasks. With a sigh of contentedness, she logged out.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
EZRAXIS PERCHED ON a spire of cracked black stone. She gripped the rock with her talons. Chips broke off under the pressure of her iron-hard claws. Around her, hot wind blew across a shattered landscape, gathering sulfurous fumes from steaming vents and black smoke where the earth itself burned.
She spread wings that cast a tremendous shadow over the tower’s base. The designs on her ribs and forearms, etched by her own claws and empowered by the blood of her enemies, glowed a fierce red when she shrieked.
Beneath her, sycophants wailed and groveled, their twisted forms suffering with the need to please her and the knowledge they could never do enough. Imps and wraiths and animal-like werebeasts crowded the base of the pillar. Hellhounds patrolled the fringes of the group, assuring that none of the beasts could flee without consequences.
The beings scuttling across hard stone and wind-scoured sand would either fight for the glory of Zaa and his general, Ezraxis, or they would be made sacrifice, their blood given to the cause instead.
Her god’s voice entered through her spine, coursed through her bones, and filled her body with ecstasy.
Yes, he said. You have pleased me today.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
EMERSON WOVE A course between saguaro cacti and weathered granite boulders. He wasn’t much of a nature guy, but the message he’d received from Devon had tipped him over the edge. He’d needed to get out of his condo for a while.
She’d sent the message around five in the morning, right after she’d logged out, he assumed. The text had been simple.
Newsflash: pain is still a major issue. I can’t be the only one.
The problem was, now she wasn’t. He had a similar report from her old guildmate, Owen. As far as Emerson knew, the pair had had no contact since starting in Relic Online. He hadn’t monitored their in-game messages, hadn’t monitored anything about their game progress for fear he might start tweaking the AI’s heuristics. But given what Devon had said about not wanting to hook up with her guildmates anytime soon, not to mention the distance between their starting locations, he seriously doubted there’d been communication.
Which brought up the question: out of going on thirty thousand
subscribers to the game, why were two of his handpicked team experiencing the same problem? He’d started them in the sandboxed areas of the world to give Veia a challenge. Eventually, the rest of the player base would migrate away from the directed content, and Emerson wanted to know that the game experience would hold up. But why would a starting location make a difference in pain sensitivity? The lack of newbie quests and class tutorials shouldn’t cause the pain responses to wig out. So what was the deal?
He stopped in the shade of a larger cactus. Though it was only midmorning, the Arizona heat was starting to build. Like an idiot, he’d forgotten water. Mini-Veia had even tried to remind him, but lately he’d been tuning her out.
He was now running the general AI in parallel with the previous smarthome software, hoping Veia would get a clue by watching the so-called expert. It still wasn’t working, and Emerson would soon have to give up unless he came up with some sort of insight. Unfortunately, he hadn’t been sleeping well, which compromised his ability to problem solve.
Was his insomnia due to worry about Devon and Owen? Excitement and anxiety about the launch? By all reports, the game looked like it was going to be a runaway success. Management was happy with how things were going.
That is, if he could solve the load issue. They were currently capped at fifteen thousand active users. Counting for downtime, that meant roughly thirty or thirty-five thousand subscribers. Not enough. And still, as far as he knew, nobody seemed to give a shit about performance on Penelope’s side of the content engine.
Emerson crouched down and picked up a rock. With a sidearm toss, he sent it skittering across the desert floor. A little rodent squeaked and sprinted from the shadow of a skeletal bush.
That was probably the root of his poor sleep. Frustration bleeding into dreams. Lately, he’d been thrown into nightmare landscapes where he teetered on the brink of deadly falls or where crazed beasts tore off his limbs.
He shuddered as emotions from last night’s parade of nightmares surfaced. With a deep breath of desert air, he shook his head and headed back to the bus that would take him home.
No, not home. Maybe it was time to pay a visit to the customer support group.
Chapter Thirty
THE PIG ROAST had apparently gone well. When Devon returned, almost a day and a half later in the game, some of her tribe members still looked hungover from the dwarven ale.
A sort of cargo train had been organized, and most of the camp’s supplies and possessions were already piling up at the new village site. All they needed from Devon was the final say on where the huts should go. While the others had ferried supplies, Bern had quarried ten stone blocks even with his hangover, and Deld was busy baking shards of stone in a pit near the new camp to create lime for the mortar.
The dwarves had set up camp at the mouth of the glade, providing protection for Devon’s tribe. A few dozen paces away, Devon marked out private locations for each of the huts on the jungle floor. Uruquat’s little iron chest was nestled among the heaps of stuff. Since she still didn’t have a way to open it, she set it down near the spot she planned for Hezbek’s hut. Eventually, either she or one of her followers would gain the lockpicking skill. Until then, Hezbek would keep it safe.
Most of the platforms from the old camp had been disassembled already, their planks salvaged for new construction. Some would be reused for a defensive wall and lookout towers. But another project took precedence. Prester had reached skill tier 3 in carpentry, and he was practically frothing at the mouth with eagerness to get started on the crafting workshop, so she gave her blessing to a central location for the building.
The prisoner had been stuffed into a small alcove at the base of the cliff. He’d gone without healing potions long enough to wake up and make the march from the old camp to the new, but Hezbek had been forced to dose him again to keep him from dying, so he now slept with wrists and ankles once again bound. Devon glanced at his wound, which was largely unchanged, shrugged, and moved on. According to the medicine woman, he’d continued to stonewall the tribe’s questions when he was awake. They were going to have to stop feeding him between potions, see if that might motivate him.
After running through additional oversight tasks like checking with Grey on the food supply and sending Hazel out to widen her survey of the surroundings, she took a seat beside the gurgling brook. It felt strange to have accomplished enough organization that there was nothing left to do for a while. She could actually focus on her character. It would be nice to grind out a couple levels. She stood and stretched. On the way toward the mouth of the little glade, she spotted Greel and realized there was one other task she wanted to accomplish today.
He glared and stomped forward with a sullen expression when she waved him over. “Yes?” he asked, sounding like an annoyed teenager.
Devon gritted her teeth. The man really had a way of making people dislike him. Nonetheless, she needed him.
“I have something for you,” she said.
Greel narrowed his eyes. “Am I supposed to jump up and down with joy?”
“Well, I’d hoped…” She pulled the Superior Steel Knife out of her bag and held it out.
Greel hesitated, one eyebrow lowered as if wondering what the catch was. After a moment, he reached out a tentative hand.
“It’s yours,” she said. “I hope it’s an adequate replacement for your beloved rusty knife.”
Greel swallowed and seemed to struggle with what to say. Finally, he nodded.
“Thank you,” he mumbled.
“Maybe you’ll decide to lend your combat strength to the village defense,” she commented.
Greel snorted. “We have a ways to go before you can put me on guard duty with the rest of these incompetents. But it is a nice knife.”
You have gained esteem with Greel: +120 Reputation.
You have completed a quest: Deal with Greel.
Congratulations! You have a new ally, as long as you don’t do something else to anger him.
Finally. She inspected him just before he moved out of range and saw that she was now 5 points above neutral with him. So, not BFF-level esteem. But at least he didn’t hate her anymore.
That finished, she hiked up her belt and straightened her snakeskin vest. Time to hunt.
***
For the next few play sessions, Devon moved in wide circles around the new camp, hunting wildlife and practicing her skills. During the week, she asked Hezbek for a little primer on herbalism and was able to start supplementing the medicine cabinet with ingredients at the same time that she brought back meat for the cookpot. She stuck with monsters lower level than herself, enough of a challenge to grant decent experience, but easy enough that she wouldn’t get hurt—at least not badly. The last two experiences with the pain setting had been enough to put her off for a while. Every fight, she tried to use a variety of skills—especially dagger strikes that raised her piercing skill. Partway through the week, she reached level 7. She put a point into Endurance so her fatigue wouldn’t build so fast, another into Focus in hopes it would help her keep concentration on her Glowing Orbs, and two into Intelligence. Her character sheet looked like this afterward:
Character: Devon (click to set a different character name)
Level: 7
Base Class: Sorcerer
Specialization: Unassigned
Unique Class: Deceiver
Health: 168/168
Mana: 304/304
Fatigue: 36%
She clicked over to the attributes section to verify the new values:
Attributes:
Constitution: 15
Strength: 10
Agility: 15
Charisma: 25
Intelligence: 25
Focus: 13
Endurance: 12
Special Attributes:
Bravery: 5
Cunning: 4
Available Points: 0
Finally, she checked out her skill
s window:
Skills:
Unarmed Combat: 3
One-handed Slashing - Tier 2: 12
One-handed Piercing - Tier 2: 10
Darkvision - Tier 2: 10
Tracking: 4
Stealth: 2
Combat Assessment: 4
Sprint: 1
Leadership: 8
Bartering: 6
Special Skills:
Improvisation: 3
Her slashing and piercing had reached Tier 2—which unfortunately meant that the skill gain had slowed way down. She was still really far from using the ivory fangs. But at least it was progress. Finally, she checked her abilities and saw that Flamestrike - Tier 1 was at 92% mastery, and Shadow Puppet - Tier 1 was at 68%.
When she was in the village during meals, she sat around the campfire with her followers and the Stoneshoulder Clan, as she learned they were called. Tom’s cooking raised everyone’s morale, as did the new digs. The canopy cut the worst of the heat and even helped block some rain, but it wasn’t so thick as to be oppressive.
Sometimes, Devon wondered if the glade and the cliff behind it had been sculpted from the landscape just for her tribe. Then she got to wondering how much attention the AI was paying her, and she started down the rabbit hole of wondering why her experience was so different from what she’d seen on the forums. She thought of Relic Online as a game less and less frequently, and when she did, it was a little disappointing, like a spell had been broken. So aside from her alarms for eating and sleeping and the occasional glimpse of the real-world sunshine, she stayed in game and enjoyed it.
Temple of Sorrow: A LitRPG and GameLit Adventure (Stonehaven League Book 1) Page 19
