by Edward Brody
There was another path at the back of the chamber wall, leading further into the cave, and Ozzy started down it, the rest of us behind him.
“I don’t know what’s beyond this point,” Jeremy said. “Be extra careful from here on.”
The next path was a little smaller than the last, and there were several spider webs dangling from the ceiling with hundreds of spiders latched to them idly. I prayed to the gods that there weren’t any giant arachnids inside of the cave; I didn’t want to deal with that horror again.
I hulked down instinctively as we cleared the spider-filled path and entered the next chamber, and like the one before, the chamber looked empty.
“This whole place looks cleared out,” Ozzy says. “This might be a bust.”
“There’s something up there,” Rina said, pointing to the ceiling.
I looked up, and along the ceiling where six or seven large, brown creatures that resembled giant spiders but had longer bodies and looked to have ten legs or more on each side with two long feelers attached to their head.
Name: cave centipede
Race: arthropod
Level: 19
Health/Mana/Stamina: 200/10/240
Status: aggressive
“They don’t seem to have noticed us,” Rina noted.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s weird that they aren’t attacking when their status reads as if they’re agg—“
Before I had time to say ‘aggressive’, one of the centipedes fell from the ceiling, shrieked, and immediately jumped at Ozzy. Ozzy barely had time to hold up his shield to block the attack as all the other centipedes fell all around us.
“It’s showtime guys!” I yelled as Ozzy stomped his foot and let out an Intimidating Shout, rotating his head from side to side, trying to affect as many of the centipedes as possible.
Several of the centipedes jumped on Ozzy, and he blocked what he could and swung his mace at the others. Adeelee, Donovan, and I rushed for the centipedes and started slashing and hacking at their legs and bodies. Arrows were flying past us, landing into the furthest monsters. I saw Keysia send a ball of magic from her staff, and Ozzy’s body glowed as Rina healed him from any bites the centipedes were landing.
It was a quick and somewhat easy battle, and within a couple minutes, it was all over. Dead centipedes and white guts were splattered all over the ground.
You have gained 3200 XP!
“Boom!” Ozzy said. “Level 21!”
“Nice job!” Jeremy said.
“Nice job, indeed,” I agreed. “Hopefully a sign of things to come.” I shoved Ozzy on the shoulder. “Looks like you’ll be fighting in tier 2 from now on.”
Ozzy lowered his eyelids a little. “Oh yeah… Damn! I totally forgot about the fighting tiers.”
I scanned the corpses with my eyes then looked over to the single opening leading further into the cavern. “These guys won’t have anything to loot. Let’s move on.”
“Wait,” Jax said. “There’s something over there.” He scurried across the chamber until he lifted an almost invisible handle of a bag that was halfway buried under dirt and dust at the edge of the cave wall.
“Damn, he’s got good eyes,” Jeremy said.
Jax flipped open the bag and pulled out 215 gold, an emerald, and a gold non-magical ring. “Don’t know why anyone would leave this here, but a good find nonetheless.”
I smiled. 215 gold was indeed a nice find, and just a few weeks earlier, I would have been jumping for joy at finding that amount of gold. But, since leveling up and fighting stronger and stronger enemies, 215 gold seemed almost trivial. I could earn over 600 gold in a fight in the Arena now, and our shop was bringing in over 1000 gold daily. It was amazing how you could scale your earnings in MMOs, and it seemed that Eden’s Gate was no exception.
We followed the path that led further into the hallway, and throughout our entire journey, I’d stop and cast Divine Sight on everyone whenever the spell ran out. As for the other buffs, Rina, Adeelee and I threw them out randomly, but with their short duration, it was impossible to keep all of them on us all the whole time unless we wanted to stop and meditate constantly, which we didn’t want to do.
The path was long and started to slow down gradually as we continued.
Halfway down the pathway, there was a clicking noise, and Ozzy paused. “Did you hear that?” he asked.
Before anyone could reply, a throng of sharp, metal spikes rose out of the ground and pierced into his body. Ozzy froze, and his eyes went wide. When he looked down to see the sharp spikes piercing him in various locations, he screamed.
A second later, the spikes retracted, pulling out of Ozzy’s body as they retreated to their hiding place in the floor.
Ozzy fell to his knees.
“Quick!” Jax yelled. “Pull him away!”
Donovan and I ran forward and grabbed Ozzy by the arms. We dragged him back across the cavern floor, and only a moment after his body was off the circular trap, the spikes rose again.
“I’m bleeding,” Ozzy groaned. “Shit!”
“I see that,” Rina said as she raised her hand to heal Ozzy, then kneeled down and started bandaging his wounds.
It took us a few minutes to get Ozzy’s bleeding stopped, heal him up, and get him to a point where he was back on his feet and mentally prepared to move forward.
“Those spikes did a number on my armor,” Ozzy said as he pointed to several holes in his leggings. He looked up and over to the trap on the ground. It was difficult to see on the dirty cavern floor, but since the spikes had already risen once, they had pushed a lot of the dirt and dust out of the way to reveal the small holes that the spikes shot out of. The trap was roughly three meters in diameter. “How do we get past this?” Ozzy asked.
“Jump?” I questioned.
“I don’t know if I can make that jump in this armor,” Ozzy said.
“A skipping jump,” Donovan suggested. “Jump as far as you can and thrust yourself off the foot you land on before the spikes come back up.”
“Let’s see you do it first,” Ozzy said. “You’re more agile than me.”
Donovan shrugged. “Well, so long as the trap is triggered with pressure, then I think it will be fine.”
He stepped in front of Ozzy and stood a few meters back from the trap. He ran forward, leapt, and almost cleared the entire trap with one jump before stepping on the edge of the trap. Immediately as his foot touched down, he skipped to the other side.
The spikes shot up right after his foot was off it and then retracted back into the ground.
“Not too difficult,” Donovan said.
We each took turns mimicking Donovan’s jump across the spikes and we all made it without injury, but Ozzy almost ended up getting himself pierced by the spikes again. As he touched down on his heavy armor boots, he attempted a quick skip but ended up falling and sliding forward on the ground. He fell far enough that he was able to clear the trap, but it was a sloppy and embarrassing landing.
After the trap, the path continued downwards, and the circumference of the passage got smaller and smaller until we were all crouching as we moved forward.
“How could any giant monster fit through this?” I asked. “And we haven’t seen a single snake the whole way.”
Jeremy shook his head. “I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense to me either, but I’m not making it up. There were a ton of snakes in this cave before and at least one massive one too.”
The narrowing path slowly started getting wider again and then opened up to another chamber. This particular chamber was almost completely round, and looked man-made. It was totally out of place in an otherwise natural cave. The floor was smoother than the rest of the cave, and while the walls were still rocky and uneven, there were no loose rocks on the ground like there had been everywhere else. In the center of the chamber, a stone pedestal rose from the ground.
“What the hell is this?” Ozzy asked as we stepped inside.
“Careful,” Donova
n said. “There could be more traps in here.”
“This is it?” Adeelee asked. “There are no snakes here, and it looks like a dead end.”
“Fuck,” I cursed, turning my head, seeing no other paths forward. “We really came all this way for nothing?”
“Not for nothing,” Jax cooed as he stepped up to one of the walls. “Do you guys see this?” He rubbed his fingers across a bit of discolored, dark brown rock in the wall, stepped sideways and rubbed his finger against another bit of discolored rock. “Vorporite… There’s deposits all along these walls.”
Keysia, Adeelee, and Donovan all started examining the walls, and their eyes went wide.
“This is quite the find,” Donovan said. “I’ve never seen so much Vorporite in one place.”
“Vorporite?” I asked. “What’s the hell is that?”
“A rare, naturally occurring metal.” Jax explained. “Not the hardest metal you can find in Eden’s Gate, but more durable than iron, copper, or steel. If we mine this, we can craft special higher-quality weapons and armor. Hell, we could just mine it, smelt it, and sell the ingots for a good amount of gold.”
“That’s awesome,” I said, “but—” I held my hands up and out to the side. “—no snakes, no serpent. I can’t be excited about some metal deposits when there’s no sign of what we came for.”
“We can still backtrack to the other path at the beginning of the cave,” Keysia said. “And what about the pedestal over there?”
I walked up to pedestal, and the top of it consisted of flat, smooth stone, but rising out of the center was a small stone triangle. Etched on the top of the triangle was a short, upside mallet and two strange rune-like marks on each side.
“That’s dwarven,” Adeelee said. “This must have been a dwarven cave at some point.”
“A dwarven cave in the Freelands?” I asked.
Adeelee nodded. “Long ago, Eden’s Gate was a different place, Gunnar. Dwarves were once common in the Freelands, long before this area was called the Freelands.”
I smiled but didn’t say anything. Long ago? I thought. When Adeelee or the others made comments like that, sometimes I was reminded that I was living in a game, and all the NPCs had been programmed. Their history, their lives, and everything they knew up until the launch of the Eden’s Gate servers had been deliberately written or procedurally generated.
That was the thing, I realized as I continued thinking. Since entering Eden’s Gate, I often wondered what set Reborns apart from NPCs, other than the fact that we could respawn and came from Earth, but I could never find any definitive answer. We both had our own thoughts, our own personalities, and NPCs behaved just like real people, but there was that one thing that truly set us apart.
Reborns had a real past and NPCs didn’t.
Their present and future was just as real as a Reborn, but their past was completely fabricated.
But what did that mean for anyone who would be born in Eden’s Gate at a later time? If a child were conceived in Eden’s Gate—if that were possible—wouldn’t that make the child just as ‘real’ as a Reborn? And even if my past was real, did that matter? For every moment forward, my past was just a memory, just like an NPC’s memory. So even if the NPCs did have that one thing that was so different than us, were Reborns really any different? We saw our past as just another memory, just like them.
“Gunnar?” Adeelee said, snapping me out of my muddled thoughts. “Did you hear what I said?”
“Yeah, about the dwarves,” I replied.
“No,” she corrected. “I asked if you had tried manipulating the symbol on the pedestal. It’s obviously there for a reason.”
I shook my head. “No… I haven’t touched anything yet.”
“A random pedestal like that in an empty room like this doesn’t sit well with me,” Jax muttered. “It could be another trap, even if I’m not detecting anything.”
“Shouldn’t we should just try it while we’re here?” I asked. “If we backtrack to the beginning of the cave and don’t find anything down the other pathway, we’ll end up wondering what we might have missed.”
“That’s true,” Jeremy said. “I think we should just try it. I mean, it looks sorta like a button, right?”
“I’m for it, too,” Ozzy said.
Keysia and Donovan looked wary. I suppose the Reborns were less cautious for obvious reasons.
“You’re the guild leader,” Rina said. “You make the call. It might not do anything. Maybe it’s just for decoration.”
“Alright, let’s just try it,” I said. “Everyone be alert, and get ready to move if we need to.” I placed my hand on the triangle and pressed, but it didn’t budge, and then I grabbed it by the edges and tried twisting it left and then right, but it didn’t move at all. “Nothing…”
“Press it harder,” Donovan said. “This room looks like it’s been untouched for years. It might be stuck.”
I placed both hands on the triangle and pressed into it with all my weight, and finally, it made a gritting noise as it slid into the pedestal the slightest bit—a millimeter at most—but no matter how hard I pressed, it didn’t move any further. I took a step back and looked around but saw nothing had changed. “If it was a button, then it looks like it’s broken now. Let’s just head back to where we started.”
We turned around and started for the path in which we came, but no sooner than we took a few steps, a thick, stone door shot out of the smooth ground below and slammed up in front of the entrance, blocking the path from which we came.
“What the hell?!” Ozzy shouted.
There was the sound of stone grinding against stone, and when I turned around, the triangle on top of the pedestal was slowly easing itself deep inside of the pedestal, and the pedestal started rotating clockwise. A second later, the floor was rotating counterclockwise and we started to descend.
“Guys!” Jeremy cried as he held his arms out to maintain his balance. “What’s going on?!”
“We’re going deeper into the cave!” Adeelee yelled. “The button must have activated it!”
“Ready your weapons!” Jax yelled.
I grabbed my sword and did my best to hold my equilibrium as the floor spun and descended further into the cave.
We spun slowly for another ten or fifteen seconds before the walls around us opened, and I could see that we had entered another chamber. Finally, the floor stopped at the bottom of the cave, and we were inside a large, circular space where the walls extended several meters away from the platform we dropped in on, and there were coffins arranged neatly on the floor around us. The lids on each coffin had been removed, and many of them were broken, but each lid contained the sculpture of a dwarf.
“What is this?” Jeremy asked.
“Looks like some kind of dwarven tomb,” Keysia said.
“And look like someone’s looted it well before we got here,” Jax said.
I walked over to one of the coffins, looked inside, and there was the brittle skeletal remains of a dwarf. I turned and looked in another, and saw the same—but this time, the bones were a jumbled mess. As I peeked inside a third coffin, I heard a light hissing noise, and the low sounds of a rattler.
“Did you hear that?” I asked.
There was another rattle, and then synchronous sound of several hisses at once, and then the sudden sound of rattling all around us.
A small, brown, speckled snake slithered out the eyeball of the skeleton I was looking at, and the moment it saw me, it dashed out of the coffin and onto the ground. I jumped and looked to the floor to see where the snake landed, but instead, I saw many more snakes slithering slowly out from under the coffin and even more pouring from all the coffins around us.
“They’re everywhere!” Rina shrieked.
“Back to the center!” I yelled as I swiped my sword at a snake that was slithering towards me. I turned and ran, jumping over snakes as I passed.
Everyone managed to clear the snakes and make it back to the ba
se where we descended from, and when we were gathered together, Rina hid in the center and the others formed a circle around her.
I looked at the pedestal, ready to press the button again to send us back to the top, but the triangle had sunk deep inside, and there was no visible way that I could remove it.
“There’s hundreds of them!” Ozzy yelled.
“Keysia, I think this is where you’re going to come in handy!” I yelled as the countless snakes closed in and I joined at the outer edge of the circle.
I held out my hand and focused on casting a Fire Curtain across as many of the snakes as I could, and I could hear Keysia release her lighting spell behind me.
You have gained 30 XP!
You have gained 30 XP!
The snakes in the fire immediately started twisting and turning as they were affected by the flames, most of them dying almost instantly. The snakes near the flames that didn’t get hit turned and scurried back.
I started launching Fireblasts in every direction, and Keysia launched a globe of magic from her staff before turning and shooting another lighting attack to her side.
Everyone else was kicking away the snakes or hitting them with their weapons as they closed in.
You have gained 30 XP!
You have gained 30 XP!
You have gained 30 XP!
You have reached level 9 in Fire Magic!
It was only another two minutes of constant magic attacks before the room was filled with the stench of sizzling snake. Hundreds of charred and electrocuted snake corpses littered the ground, and the few snakes that hadn’t died, slithered into hiding.
I turned to Jeremy. “So those were the snakes you were talking about?”
Jeremy shook his head. “No. I didn’t see any snakes like that last time. I mean, they looked sorta like that, but they were a lot bigger.”
I stepped closer and looked down on him with burning eyes. I was beginning to have my doubts about the story he had fed everyone. “You’re not lying to us, are you?”
