Trial by Fire: A LitRPG Dragonrider Adventure (Archemi Online Chronicles Book 2)

by James Osiris Baldwin

  “I don’t even know what that is,” I admitted. “I have no idea what Steve was doing all these years. All I know is that he was on a first-name basis with Ryuko’s CEO.”

  “Yeah. That was because of his breakthroughs on the radiant AI framework that generates our NPCs, ATHENA. Michael was close to Ms. Hashimoto as well.”

  I shook my head. “Shame they both died of HEX. I knew Steve was smart, but I didn’t know he was like… brilliant.”

  “Michael didn’t have HEX. He got cancer. Prostate cancer, I think,” Rin continued. “He was amazing at his job, but he was a really intense person. You know that Ryuko has… had a military contract division, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Michael was one of the military guys who came over to our campus as part of the OUROS handover team,” Rin said. “He was reporting back to the government on us. Like, he never said it, but we all knew. I’m surprised Steve didn’t tell you about him. Michael was, well, he was kind of a prima donna, to be honest. Everyone had an opinion about him. You never met him through your brother? They worked together.”

  If I remembered correctly, GNOSIS was the system that copied human minds and consciousness over to OUROS, which was the AI that ran Archemi. I sort of nod-shrugged uncomfortably. “Me and Steve weren’t on speaking terms for a really long time. We only made up because we both got HEX and realized we were going to die hating each other. He grandfathered me into the refugee program, but… he didn’t make the transfer.”

  “Oh.” Rin looked down at her hands in her lap. “I’m sorry.”

  I had a sip of coffee in the awkward pause that followed, savoring the earthy, sweet flavor. “Anyway, what happened to Michael?”

  “Umm, yes… Well, his treatment for the cancer didn’t work, because it had spread into his bones and even the nanite treatment couldn’t stop it. This was around the time the HEX refugee program was being worked out. He volunteered to go in as a ‘vanguard’, and was the first person permanently sent to Archemi.” Rin still didn’t look up at me, picking a bit of lint off her glove. “We had this joke about him being the ‘Archinaut’.”

  “Did something happen to him?”

  “Yeah.” Rin winced as she pulled a trolley over to her broken Artifact. She took up a small crowbar, and began to lever off the slagged armor plating. “Michael was how we learned about cyber psychosis in perma-uploaded players. OUROS and GNOSIS were considered safe by the time we beamed him in, but it was confirmed only for immersion sessions, not for upload. Our version of OUROS was still being rated for permanent transfers. Michael’s upload was successful, but...”

  “But what?”

  “Something went wrong,” Rin admitted. Now that she was concentrating on fixing Hopper, her voice was more confident, less hesitant and girlish. “He got stuck in some glitch and the system didn’t recognize him as a character. It self-corrected, but he kept spawning in the wrong place. He incarnated in the sky somewhere over the Northern Continent and fell through the map into this void, then died. Every time he died, he’d respawn in the same place, and… well… smoosh.”

  It was my turn to wince. I hadn’t repeatedly fallen to my doom, but I’d definitely had some variant of the same problem. “Jesus.”

  “The game corrected itself after about a dozen iterations, but it was too late. It turns out dying a lot is like… really bad for you, psychologically.”

  “Gee. Who’d have thought?”

  “I know, right? Well, there’s a temporary amnesia thing in place now to stop what we called the ‘Michael Effect’. We didn’t know dying would be so much of a problem, because the testers who hadn’t perma-jumped had no problem with dying in game. They were nervous the first time, but after that they’d just laugh it off like a normal game experience.”

  “Seems like something that should have been picked up.”

  “Sure, but they didn’t.” She shrugged. “The Transference Team predicted it would be a bigger deal for permas, but they didn’t know how much of a bigger deal. Mind you, Michael hid his psychosis for a good long while.”

  I shook my head. “So what happened?”

  “Michael seemed okay to me,” Rin said slowly. “We were all following his progress on our screens, you know... it was kind of a company-wide miracle. He was obviously still him, even though his body was now in cryo and everything. He performed for us, showed us all around Ilia… but that whole time, he was modifying the game from the inside. Little bit by little bit. That corruption you’re describing in the Knights of St. Grigori? That’s not part of the game canon. That was all stuff he did. He started this secret personality cult, the ‘Cult of the Architect’, elevated himself to demi-god status, and rewrote bits of Ilia’s history. Then, one day he just… upped and killed King Rosvin and took over the country.”

  “How?”

  Rin shrugged. “He had access to the developer panel and he knew how to program ATHENA to make it look like the NPCs around him were acting of their own free will. Of course, as soon as the company realized he was treating Archemi like his own personal sandbox, they removed his Developer access. And then he just… got it back, and kept screwing with the game. He told them this is why he thought the HEX refugee program was a bunch of baloney. ‘Imagine if someone who wasn’t responsible did this.’ He used to say that all the time.”

  I blinked. “What do you mean he kept ‘screwing with the game’?”

  “They kept taking his Dev access away. And he kept getting it back somehow.” Rin replied, tooling around on Hopper’s frame. “They changed his character type to NPC and rolled back the changes he’d made, but then the AI organically carried out Michael’s version of events and gave him back his special character status and access to the Dev Panel. He blocked out other players from uploading and continued to just… taking over the world.”

  “He turned himself into a virus?” I looked down at the Spear of Nine Spheres resting in my lap, and swallowed.

  “Basically. The CEO had to make the decision to... well... delete him. It was horrible, but they had to. They deleted him and rolled back his changes to the game, because otherwise the refugees would be compromised. I know that the AI kept executing his version of the Ilian civil war, but I didn’t know it had kept going with all the other horrible stuff he decided was fun. The incident with Michael destabilized OUROS and ATHENA and made perma-uploads for new players more dangerous. It nearly derailed the entire refugee program.”

  I grimaced, rubbing the back of my right hand. “Did anyone ever say whether or not his glitchy upload was a factor in his turning into some evil overlord of suck?”

  “Almost certainly.” Rin replied fussily. “I mean, if the data is corrupt to start with, it’s just going to corrupt further over time. Entropy is the natural trajectory of things. Even if a human profile preserves consciousness, the perception of the conscious individual is warped by their corrupted data. Especially if they die over and over. No one ever said porting our minds to a game was an ideal solution, you know?”

  I felt my heart sink with every word. Swallowing, I glanced over at Karalti. She was sleeping peacefully, her tail wrapped around her body, her foreclaws clasped over her eyes. Her chest rose and fell, and now and then, her tail twitched in time with her dreams. Had my brother known about the Michael incident? He had to have known. Why hadn’t he said anything to me, or even told me about the risks?

  “Listen, there were some really dodgy quests in Ilia,” I said quietly. “Michael – Ororgael – was Rutha’s teacher, and she gave me the Spear. Like I said, it’s a soul-bonded weapon that doesn’t really seem to be soul-bonded. As far as I can tell, it’s only purpose was to trick a player into opening this Pandora’s Box thing down in the ruins of Cham Garai. Do you know anything about that?”

  “Well, the Spear is definitely real.” Rin looked back uncomfortably. “What you’re describing sounds like something Ororgael would have done. He set up trojans for the other Devs when they were trying to clean him out. D
id you complete the quest line?”

  “No.” I got up restlessly. “Someone else took the Spear from me and did it. He’s a dragon knight now... or I assume he is. His name’s Baldr Hyland. Last I saw, he had the Pearl of Glorious Dawn embedded in his face.”

  “Oh.” Rin looked down. “That’s not good. I think the Pearl is the key to… goodness, who’s Dragon Gate was it…?”

  “Solnetsi,” I replied, pacing in front of the forge.

  “I don’t know anything about her lore. I think she’s a goddess of war or something.” Rin shook her head, and as she did, I saw a glint of metal at her throat. A thin chain, just like the one on the necklace I’d picked up on the ground. I still hadn’t had a chance to look at mine.

  “Well, nothing I can do about it in Taltos,” I said with a sigh, and jammed my hands in my pockets. “Hey, I’m feeling pretty strung out after that chat: do you mind if I try my hand at some Crafting? This is the first place I’ve seen with player-ready crafting stations.”

  “Sure!” Rin nodded, leaning over to look at something underneath her artifact. “What are you going to make?”

  “I REALLY need new armor. Not that I’m probably going to be able to craft any.”

  “What’s your Armorsmithing skill level?”

  I checked. “Uhh... Zero.”

  “If you’re just starting out, refine some materials and practice making leather bracers.” Rin pointed at a bin full of what appeared to be raw animal pelts. “It’d actually be a huge help if you can refine all those pelts into Leather and turn some of that scrap metal into Iron and Copper ingots and fittings. I don’t get any EXP from that kind of work anymore, but you’ll level up five or six times if you do it. You can use any of the ingots you make.”

  “Aren’t those expensive?”

  “Not really. Kanzo and I craft clocks and crucibii for the House of Corvinus and the Forgers. We’re not short on supplies or money.”

  I stared at her. “You craft for the Church?”

  “Of course. The Volod is - well, was - our patron. Humans farm out their magical crafting to us whenever they can.”

  Listening to a former Dev refer to ‘humans’ as if they were a different species was surreal, but I shrugged it off. I was glad to be thinking about something other than Ororgael and Baldr for a while. I got heartburn every time I thought about that backstabbing albino asshole. “Okay – anything in the shop I can’t use?”

  “Not that I can think of.” She shook her head, picking up what looked like a small welding torch. She twisted around to get a small glowing capsule that she slotted into it. As she twisted, I saw a glimmer at her throat – the necklace.

  I jerked my nose toward her. “Hey, one last thing before I start: did you make that necklace you’re wearing? It’s pretty.”

  “What? This?” Rin looked up, and then reached up to pull the delicate chain out from under her shirt. “No, Kanzo made this. He gives one to all of his apprentices. I’m not the first. He mentored several other NPCs who are Journeymen… we all get one of these.”

  At the end of the chain was an unusual pendant: a stylized bee, about an inch long, with a spiral seal embossed on the back and magical runes on each delicately-worked section of its abdomen. The body of the bee was partially hollow, and a straight metal axle ran down the center of its body on the inside of the pendant, visible through the gaps in the design. I carefully felt my captured necklace with my fingertips. It was a replica of the same pendant.

  “Bee bling. Nice.” I chuckled, and pulled my hand out of my pocket as I headed over to the Forge. “What’s it mean?”

  “It’s Kanzo’s personal House Mark,” Rin replied. “And the Maker’s Mark of this workshop. He was exiled from his House in Zaunt – our homeland – because he refused to make war machines for his Tlaxican. He was disinherited, which is an awful thing to happen to a Mercurion. But he made the best of it: he was from the House of the Hornet, a very wealthy House in North Zaunt, so he took the honey bee as his own House symbol. He told me that he’d rather be like a bee than a hornet, living a humble life and making things that are beautiful and useful for people. He told me that the only use for weapons was to defend yourself.”

  Or to do kinky murder-bondage with helpless priests. I nodded and smiled anyway as I approached the forge. When I was close to it, a prompt jumped up in my HUD. [This is your first time using a Crafting Forge. Do you want a tutorial?]

  “Sure,” I thought back.

  Using a Forge

  Realistic as Archemi can be, Crafting is supposed to be fun! You will be using a simple system that can be roleplayed in a realistic fashion, if desired.

  To use a Forge, you need Forge Tools. Smelting metal ore into ingots requires a lit Furnace, Tongs, and an Ingot Mold. When you pour molten metal into Ingot Molds, they will cool and be added to your Inventory.

  You can smelt certain types of ingots together to create alloys, which are required for many types of items. Try smelting [1 x Pure Charcoal] with [2 x Iron ingot] and see what you get!

  To make tools, you need Tool Molds. Mold blueprints can be found in Smithing craft books. Once you learn a blueprint, forge it the mold, then pour melted ingots and any other required ingredients into the mold to create the tool.

  To turn ingots into armor, weapons, and tools, you will need a Hammer and Anvil. Anvils can nearly always be found beside Forges.

  To make weapons, you will also need a Plunge – a bucket of water (or other liquid) which you will use to quench your crafted weapons.

  To make Heavy Armor, you will need a Dishing Form.

  To make Medium and Light Armor, you will need a Riveter.

  Once you have the correct tools and ingredients, you will be walked through a crafting minigame that will determine the success of your crafting attempt. The more you practice, the easier the game gets and the more items you can craft, so don’t give up!

  You can only craft the items available to you at your current level. As your skill level increases, so does your understanding. Unless you have the Prodigy trait, you can train yourself to Beginner 5 in any craft. You will then need an instructor to unlock the next set of levels, which will take you to Apprentice 1. NPC Instructors can be found in most towns and all large cities, and other players might be able to help you as well.”

  I heard banging from across the room, and glanced over to see Rin’s eyes flicking from place to place as she hammered out a brass plate with what looked like lightning speed.

  Based on that tutorial, I could guess that refining pelts into leather required a knife, so I drew mine as I went to the bin of unrefined skins. It contained Tanned Deer Hide x 200, so it was going to keep me busy for a while. The first thing I did was check my own inventory to see what I already had:

  [Iron Ore x 49]

  [Copper Ore x 32]

  [Charcoal x 225]

  [Fox Pelt x 19]

  [Wolf Pelt x 5]

  [Monster Skin]

  Yeah, I had a lot of charcoal. It weighed nearly nothing and it made starting fires easy, so there was no reason for me not to have a ton of it.

  I set up my tools. The leather was first. I got a very brief tutorial on how to deal with hides:

  Leather Goods

  Creating [Leather] is a four-step process.

  First, you must collect a hide by skinning an animal, then you must cure it. To cure the hide, apply salt to it and use a knife, dagger or scraper to scrape the fur away.

  The next stage is tanning. Tan hides by applying [Tanning Solution] to the cleaned hide. It will turn into leather.

  Cut leather by equipping any appropriately sharp tool - a Leather Trimmer works best.

  You can further refine leather by boiling it to make [Hard Leather] or cutting it into [Leather Strips].

  By riveting together two sheets of [Hard Leather], you can make [Leather Plate].

  I nodded after the narrator finished speaking, and got to work. My pelts were uncured - fortunately, they weren’t the s
ort of items that turned gross with time, because I’d had them for a while. I rubbed salt on the wet side of the hide, drying it, then used my dagger to scrape them down. That was my first introduction to the rhythm-based minigame. A blue line would light up on the hide, and when I touched the pelt with the blade, it would travel down in a straight line at a certain speed. The edge of the knife had to remain inside the borders of the line. The bigger the hide, the more swipes you had to do. The [Fox Hide] took 5; the [Wolf Hide] took 10. I discovered that I was also able to salt and scrape the Monster Skin, turning it into a Monster Hide. That was worth 20 silver Rubles - not a bad price for a single component.

  The workshop had a big barrel of foul-smelling tanning solution, so I took all of the hides over there and began working. It was fucking nasty. I called out to Rin. “What is this stuff made out of?”

  “Do you really want to know?” She called back.

  “Yeah. If nothing else so that I can brag about sticking my hands in it.”

  She laughed, a high, musical sound. “Mostly pulverized oak bark. Oh... and urine.”

  I made a face. “I said it before, and I’ll say it again. Whoever thought up this game is a complete fucking sadist.”

  Hides turned to leather at a 1:1 ratio, and [Leather x 1] could be sliced into [Leather Straps x 10], but hardening leather required [Leather x 2] to produce one piece. I tried them all, and even got a Riveter and made some [Leather Plates], which were used for most kinds of Medium Armor.

  [You have reached Leatherworking 2!]

  [You have reached Leatherworking 3!]