by A. J. Markam
So while the orc, Priest, Shadow Knight, and goblin were all straining to keep up with the sand trolls, I rolled over them fairly easily.
Even despite that power disparity, I was pretty damn shocked by what Blutus was capable of.
As soon as I turned him loose he roared like a lion and shot out a 40-foot chain, wrapped a sand troll in it, and yanked him across the courtyard. When the troll hit the ground in front of us, Blutus swung a chain in his other hand like the world’s furriest Hell’s Angel and slammed it into the troll’s head.
Then savagely did it again.
And again.
And again.
Until he caved in the troll’s skull.
“Holy shit,” I said admiringly.
Blutus daintily picked up his paw-like foot and made a prissy face. “Where? Did I step in any?”
“Any what?” I asked in confusion, then retraced my conversational steps. I didn’t have to go back far. “No – no, ‘holy shit’ is a – never mind. Just keep doing what you’re doing.”
So he did.
Man, did he ever.
He flung chains at the sand trolls that wrapped around their bodies, binding their arms to their sides and effectively immobilizing them. He whipped chains around the trolls’ calves and yanked out their feet from under them. And he bashed in trolls’ heads with abandon.
Add in my Soul Suck, Meera’s sword, and Stig’s fireballs, and we basically wiped the floor with them.
By the time our four companions finished their second kill, we’d obliterated the other eight.
Were the other guys grateful?
Hell no.
They just looked at all the dead trolls, sniffed haughtily, and ran on ahead.
I rolled my eyes and started looting the corpses. I’d just finished the first one when I heard someone speaking in a foreign language.
“Idiota – você é retardado?”
I looked up to see the Death Knight glaring at me and shaking his head.
I’d taken French in high school, and whatever he was speaking wasn’t French. It sort of sounded like Spanish, but not quite – which led me to surmise it was Portuguese.
You didn’t need to know what the hell he was speaking, though, to recognize the contempt in his voice.
And ‘retardado’ came through loud and clear.
I stood up straight and faced him. I was absolutely itching to throw a Darkbolt. “What the fuck did you just say to me?”
The irony wasn’t lost on me that I sounded exactly like the troll who’d mocked my name earlier.
The difference was, I was doing what I came here to do: get money. I hadn’t said anything to this douchebag, insult or otherwise, and now this asswipe was copping an attitude?
Little Level 10 Shadow Knight was going to learn what it was like to tussle with a Level 15 Warlock packing two demons and an angel.
“What does… ‘re-tar-dah-do’ mean?” Blutus asked hesitantly.
“It’s not nice,” I snapped, then turned back to the Shadow Knight.
He said something else in Portuguese I couldn’t understand, though I was pretty sure it was along the lines of ‘suck my dick.’
Before I could say anything in reply, Stig jumped up on a troll body, thrust his finger through the OK symbol, and yelled, “FUCKOFF!”
fwap-fwap-fwap-fwap-fwap
That apparently didn’t sit well with Mr. Shadow Knight.
He drew his sword and lunged at my imp –
I started to cast a Darkbolt –
Meera raised her sword –
Blutus whirled his chain –
“Everybody just CALM THE FUCK DOWN!” a new voice yelled.
I turned to see the goblin Hunter over to the side. He’d apparently run back to check on where the hell the rest of the dungeon party was.
The Shadow Knight stood down, so I backed off and told my guys to do the same. “Everybody hold off for a second.”
Meera and Blutus lowered their weapons.
“What the hell is going on?!” the goblin barked.
The Shadow Knight said in broken English, “Stoo-peed fuckhead is loot the bodies.”
The goblin looked at me and sneered, “Are you here to grab a few pennies, or are you here to run the dungeon?”
You little fucker –
“If you’d listened to me outside the dungeon instead of walking away while I was talking, you would’ve heard me say that I’m ONLY here for the loot – not you, not the XP, and I could give a fuck about ‘running the dungeon,’ since I’ve already run it.”
“Why didn’t you say something before?!” the goblin yelled.
“Maybe you didn’t hear my first sentence: IF YOU’D LISTENED TO ME OUTSIDE THE DUNGEON INSTEAD OF WALKING AWAY WHILE I WAS TALKING, YOU WOULD’VE HEARD ME SAY I’M ONLY HERE FOR THE LOOT. There, did you hear me THAT time?!”
The goblin fumed and muttered under his breath, but there wasn’t a whole lot he could say.
“Fine, just… loot ‘em and try to catch up,” he growled.
“‘Try’ to catch up? Yeah, I don’t think that’ll be a problem,” I sneered.
He gave me a death glare to match the Shadow Knight’s, and then the two of them raced off through the labyrinth.
“Shitheads,” I muttered as I went about my looting. Very leisurely, I might add.
When I got to the next courtyard, the four were basically being used as pincushions by the cobras. The dead Priest was doing his damnedest to keep his teammates alive, but with all the poison debuffs, they were basically down at around 200 hit points max, each.
Blutus, Stig, Meera, and I ripped through the cobras like a fat kid through a pack of Twizzlers.
As I went around afterwards breaking off the fangs, the others all just muttered angrily amongst themselves, then took off again.
“They never learn,” I said in mock sadness.
And thus began a pattern.
I would loot after they ran off. A minute later, one or more of them would run past me, obviously having gotten killed and resurrected back in the graveyard. Whenever this happened, they cold-shouldered me to a comical degree – to the point that they could be running right past me and would consciously avert their eyes. Sort of like an exaggerated, more malicious version of that guy at work you pass 22 times a day in the hall and stop making eye contact with.
I would arrive a few minutes later to find them getting their asses handed to them. Then Meera, Stig, Blutus and I would join the battle and annihilate any enemies still left (which was usually 80-90% of them).
After all the monsters were dead, the other four players would glower and mutter for a few seconds. Then they would dash off to go get killed and resurrected so they could run past me repeatedly while I kept looting.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
As a system, it worked pretty well… if what you wanted to do was get loot and engender lots of bad blood.
But seeing as they were a bunch of assclowns who couldn’t find their dicks if they had a map, I didn’t really care about the bad blood, so… fuck ‘em.
I really wanted to start shouting shit like, ‘What is that, death number 17?’ but I figured I didn’t need to pour gasoline on the fire.
I hated them, they hated me – better to keep it Cold War-style instead of World War III.
By the time I walked into the last courtyard, they had managed to trigger ever goddamn grave in the place. Which was a feat, since the graves were arranged in clumps of four with huge spaces between groups.
Anyway, the other players were overrun with Ghouls and dying at a furious clip.
Me and my crew stepped in and cleaned up.
Was there a word of thanks?
NO. Of course not. Just a lot more resentful sneers and muttered comments to each other, along with a couple of nasty-sounding laughs.
“You’re welcome,” I said angrily as I started looting the Ghouls.
“Well, you’re welcome we got YOU this far,” the orc said snottily.
I was about to say, Got ME this far?
Yeah, RIGHT, asshole.
But then I saw what was about to happen, and I held my tongue.
The orc and the others turned the corner at the far end of the courtyard.
Unfortunately for them, I knew what was around that corner.
I hit ‘em with a slooooow clap the second they disappeared.
Clap…
…clap…
…clap…
…clap…
They reappeared with faces blushing, brows scowling, eyes flashing murder.
…clap…
“Pretty awesome dead end, huh?”
…clap…
“Thanks for getting me this far. Don’t know how I could have done it without you.”
…clap…
I could see it on their faces: they wanted to kill me. The only thing stopping them was they knew that me and my homies would make worm food out of them.
“Why didn’t you SAY anything?!” the goblin Hunter seethed.
I smiled sweetly. “I did, but your friend already knows everything from the forums.”
“Fine,” the dead Priest sneered. “Where do we go next.”
I turned to the orc. “What do the forums say?”
He glared at me with a hatred as hot as a thousand suns. “There’s an awesome treasure if we go through the center passageway.”
I sighed. “Look guys, I know we hate each other’s guts, but trust me when I say you do not want to go to the center. Yes there’s an awesome treasure, but it is absolute hell getting to it.”
“If you’re too much of a pussy to go, we’ll gladly take your share,” the dead Priest sneered right before he dashed off through the labyrinth.
The others snickered, the Shadow Knight added something in Portuguese, and then they all followed the healer.
I stared after them in total disbelief.
Mother FUCKERS.
I had extended an olive branch and they’d spat in my faces.
Okay. Fuck ‘em all for real this time.
I was going to enjoy seeing how many times they could resurrect before they gave up.
Under the old system in OtherWorld, you could boot people out of a dungeon group. Someone would just initiate a vote via computer menu, everyone but the person in question would say yay or nay, and if the unlucky guy got voted off the island, he would instantly be teleported outside the dungeon.
Normally you wouldn’t do that unless the situation was unbearable, because then you were left with only four people to continue the dungeon. And that was a much harder row to hoe.
But people started abusing the system. A group of four would form a secret cabal, then vote the fifth guy out right before they got to a huge treasure haul, ensuring that there was more to go round for the four remaining assholes.
Obviously this practice engendered paranoia and a lot of vendettas as the screw-ees hunted the screw-ers and tried to exact revenge. People complained loudly, and the company responded by making it so no one could be forcibly kicked out. Which meant there was no way to get rid of a griefer (somebody out to cause you intentional annoyance just for the hell of it), but at least nobody was actively getting screwed over right before they reached the Motherlode.
You could also voluntarily choose to leave a dungeon at any time, but if you did, you were considered to be a deserter and the game would lock you out from entering again for an hour. So there was a steep penalty for stepping out early.
Now what happened was occasionally a group of random players would hate a fifth person so much that they would gang up on him and be absolute, complete dicks to the guy in the hopes that he would abandon the dungeon crawl. In fact, sometimes they would attack him relentlessly, killing him over and over, to infuriate and frustrate him so much that he would voluntarily quit rather than hang around.
So the game went from enabling assholes to cheat innocent players out of treasure, to more or less encouraging people to be sociopathic fuckheads, all while turning a blind eye.
Unintended consequences.
Anyway, if these guys wanted to ignore me, so be it. They wanted to be assholes, so be it. I wasn’t quitting the fuckin’ dungeon. They could step all over their dicks as much as they wanted; I would just grab my popcorn, kick up my boots, and enjoy the show while they got slaughtered.
After I looted all the Ghoul bodies, I strolled casually with my crew towards the center of the maze.
Time for the ten o’clock matinee.
When we rolled up on the center portion of the maze, the Four Assholios were materializing in the graveyard so fast and so often that they barely had time to run back before somebody else resurrected.
Wait, what was so horrible that –
Then I heard the roar of the unholy lovechild of a Predator and a walrus.
Oh yeaaaah. The sandworms.
This was going to be hilarious.
I strolled into the arena and warned Blutus, “No matter what you do, stay on this stone platform with your back against the wall.”
We all leaned up against the hieroglyphics like four cool little Fonzis and watched the retardados rush out over the sand, only to get chomped up by the non-human cast of Tremors.
After about five minutes of this, the other players began to cuss me out.
“You fuckin’ lazy asstard – why the fuck aren’t you helping us out?!”
“Filho da puta, vai para a puta que te pariu – ”
“I oughta kill you, you goddamn little shit – ”
“Guys, guys,” I said, like I was only trying to calm them down. “Have you ever thought that maybe I was showing you how not to get killed? I guess not, since you’re too busy being whiny little bitches.”
They all stopped dead in their tracks as it hit them: not a single one of my group had died since we’d walked in, despite plenty of sandworms snapping at us.
They stayed motionless an instant too long, and a sandworm came up and ate the Shadow Knight, which was pretty hilarious.
But they all rushed over to the stone ledge (including the fuckin’ Brazilian when he respawned) and put their backs to the stone wall.
“Now what do we do, asshole?” the dead Priest snapped.
“First off, you quit calling me ‘asshole,’ ASSHOLE.”
He grumbled under his breath but didn’t say anything.
“WELL?!” the orc snapped impatiently.
“What, you didn’t read about it on the forums?” I asked sweetly.
“Motherfu– ”
“Aah, aah, aaaah,” I said, wiggling my finger at him disapprovingly.
He shut up, but I could see the blood vessels bursting in his bugged-out eyeballs.
I figured it was time to get down to business, or I would be here with these losers all day.
“Start hitting them from here where they can’t get you. Once they disappear underground, well… we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”
We all concentrated on the same worm and brought it down in no time at all.
You would have thought that maybe there would’ve been a collective cheer when it died – a sort of group bonhomie over a shared triumph – but nope, they were just as miserable of dickweeds as they were before.
Suddenly all the remaining worms went underground.
“What now, genius?” the dead Priest sneered.
Meera spoke up. “I could – ”
I held up my hand to silence her. I knew she was going to offer to fly around and stomp the ground like she had yesterday, but these douchebags didn’t deserve her help.
You wanna act like a little bitch, you’re gonna get treated like a little bitch.
Time to have some fun with them.
“Yeah…” I said regretfully, “one of you’s going to have to run out there and be bait.”
They all stared at me. “What?”
“Yep.”
“Send one of your demons!” the goblin Hunter snapped.
“No
pe. They’re not heavy enough to trigger the worms.”
Total bullshit.
“The big guy’s heavy enough!” the orc roared.
“Yeah, but he’s too slow. He’ll get hit right away. It should be somebody nimble… athletic… with some heavy plate armor.” I looked over at the Shadow Knight. “Like our Portuguese friend here.”
“Brasiliero.”
“Yeah, whatever. You’re the best bet to draw them out.”
More bullshit. But they didn’t know that.
“Go on, Mateo,” the dead Priest muttered.
“Ah, vai tomar no cu,” the Shadow Knight grumbled, but he went.
“What the hell are you guys doing playing with some Brazilian dude who barely speaks English?” I asked the rest of the group.
“Like it’s any of your business who we hang out with,” the dead Priest sneered.
“Fine. Whatever,” I snarled.
The goblin was a little more conciliatory. “We’re college students in São Paulo,” he explained. “We’re learning Portuguese, Marco’s a native speaker and likes to game, so here we are.”
Huh.
These guys had an interesting story. They might have been pretty cool – if they weren’t such complete dicks half the time.
But I forgot all about that as soon as the Shadow Knight jumped off the stone ledge.
Oh MAN was it the best show ever.
He stumbled over the sand screaming like a seven-year-old girl, shrieking Brazilian obscenities in a high-pitched voice every time a worm erupted from the sand under his feet.
I couldn’t stop laughing. In fact, I was almost crying by the end, it was so funny.
But we killed the worms, and that was the important thing. The goblin Hunter, Stig, and I did ranged attacks, while any worms dumb enough to try to attack us on the stone platform got slashed by the orc’s battle ax, roasted by Meera’s sword, or bashed in the head by Blutus’s chain. Overall we made pretty short work of them.
After it was all over and we were heading across the sand towards the Sphinx – not ‘Mother’ with her riddles, but her smaller progeny – the Shadow Knight started feeling his oats about just how great he actually was.
“We not go over except because me,” he said proudly. “I am only one fastest to evade os monstros de areia.”
