Initializing

by K. T. Hanna

  Storm Entertainment

  Somnia Online Division

  Countdown: Two days to launch

  Shayla read through the report again. On one hand she was relieved, and on the other, it didn’t make any sense. She looked up at Inspector Indale, wanting to double check. “She wasn’t killed by the headset then?”

  He shook his head. “No. She was stabbed near the base of the skull with an improvised weapon, yet it was something like a thinner stiletto.”

  The inspector didn’t sound all that sure.

  “Something like? Murder weapon hasn’t been recovered?” Shayla frowned, glancing over the report. “And the headgear marks were made post mortem?”

  Indale hesitated. “We’re not sure, we think they were made beforehand. As far as the coroner can tell, anyway. It’s good news for you. Even if the press gets wind of her death with all the hype around release, it wasn’t caused by malfunctioning hardware.”

  “None of this is good. Ava deserved far better than whatever this is.” Shayla’s eyes flashed. She’d need to have a meeting about this Michael impersonator at the offices, to warn her team. “How thin was the weapon?”

  Indale shared a 3D image with Shayla.

  The object was sharp and slender, sort of like a rapier but more refined. Impossibly thin, to have enough rigidity at that length to do the job. Nothing she’d ever seen in or out of the virtual world. “Basically we have an unidentified type of object. Great.”

  She closed out of the police file, and took a deep breath, patting down her suit and brushing off imaginary dust. James was a decent replacement for now, but he was no Ava, and there wasn’t time to hire and train someone else before launch.

  Launch.

  Two days away. She’d engaged private detectives to find the Michael impersonator, but so far they’d found nothing. Ava’s death was still an unsolved homicide. Regardless of how promising that might sound, Shayla was quite certain it was going to come back and bite them in the ass at the worst possible moment.

  Real World Day 2: Somnia Online

  Murmur couldn’t move.

  Her brain panicked, all she could do was cast out her net and hope for the best. But the Brute wasn’t coherent. Its mind was a jumble of nothing, of images and words she didn’t understand even as they fled through her vision and passed through her mind.

  “It’s insane.” She whispered as soon as the stun dropped. “I have no idea what it’s going to do.”

  Dev grunted and spurred himself into a run so fast Murmur couldn’t follow him with her eyes. One minute he was next to her, and the next he was smashing his axe into the stomach of the Brute, whose health only ticked down a tiny fraction. Maybe that speed was a dread knight thing, or perhaps it was one of his hidden abilities kicking in.

  “Its skin is tougher than armor.”

  But Murmur was already on it. Suffocation to lessen its defense, Weaken to sap some of its strength, followed by Languidity to steal some of its attack speed, as well as Nullify in the hopes that it would help somehow. Her pet set to attack, she soothed it first, noticed the Brute winding up to some ability, and cast her instant stun. “Careful guys. Might need to rotate stuns on him. If he gets us with another of his stuns, I think we’re screwed. He’ll know who to hit first now.”

  Havoc glanced at her, and the frown on his face dragged her mood down. “How did you do that?”

  Not taking her eyes off the mob, keeping an eye on its health, she answered half paying attention. “Do what?”

  “Debuff, DoT, and stun him in such quick succession.” Havoc was watching her closely, she could feel and sense it. Not only feel his eyes on her, but his mind as it tried to make sense of her abilities. She couldn’t actually hear his thoughts, just sort of the flow of them.

  Everything under control for the moment, she turned to him and raised an eyebrow. “I cast my spells.”

  “Smart ass.” He glared at her. “You know what I mean.”

  She shrugged. “Not really. This Mental Acuity thing keeps doing lots of stuff before I realize it. Probably just another manifestation of its effects.”

  “Sure.” Havoc seemed anything but convinced.

  Brute’s health was down to eighty-two percent. Murmur frowned. “Get ready, just in case he blows at different intervals.”

  She knew she didn’t really have to tell them, but they’d all been taken by surprise. Sometimes focus could slip. But eighty hit them and nothing happened. If only it had stayed that way.

  Of course, her thoughts bloody well did it again.

  At seventy-five percent a shield formed around the Brute, bright and sickly in its green hue. He retched and threw up globular chunks, chunks which crept in an outward circle—one toward each of the party members. Their slug-like slithering only enhanced the fact that they appeared to be large, mobile boogers. Thankfully they didn’t seem to count the pets as party members. Beastial yanked his cat back when it yelped and yelled to the group. “Ranged attack only! Don’t touch them, they burn like acid.”

  “The shield just deflects any damage you throw at it.” Havoc muttered through clenched teeth as he pulled his pet back out of reach of the acid slugs.

  Murmur switched to DoT-ing as many of them as she could, while directing her pet mage to focus each glob down. Its ice bolts made for good damage that slowed down the slugs already slow progress. Once the group had fired down the globules and finished running around to avoid being touched by them, the shield around the Brute dissipated, and the fight started again. He very nearly got off another area stun, but Dev bashed him with his shield, screaming almost incoherently. “How you like my shield, huh?”

  Murmur tried not to laugh, but ended up snorting.

  The Brute was hitting Devlish like a truck, and Mur frowned, glancing over at Sin, who was concentrating so hard she wasn’t even wisecracking. With his hit points and her mana, it was going to be touch and go. Since Murmur didn’t have any of her mana-enhancing spells yet, she couldn’t even help.

  Her pet’s mana was also getting low, and the Brute’s health had only just fallen under sixty percent. Next time she’d make sure the pet was a strong melee damage pet, or else a ranger so it wouldn’t be hampered by a lack of something like mana.

  When the second shield formed around him, it pulsed a darker, sickly shade. A second wave of globules attacked, and it took a few seconds for Murmur to notice the zombie mage standing next to the Brute, its spells solely focused on nuking her pet. Activating a Mez, she was relieved to see that it still affected this type of undead. For all she’d known, you couldn’t Mesmerize something with shriveled brains.

  This time the globules gave a splutter when they died. Sort of a shaking tremble, followed by a shudder that made them explode. Havoc’s Leroy was the only one who took damage from it, but since its health dropped below fifty percent, Murmur was willing to bet it would have hurt them all just as much. Since the zombie had been added and the globs exploded, Murmur was willing to bet that the next round would up the danger even more. Renewing her Mez, she tried to refresh the slow on the Brute, but the system didn’t like that, at least not while he had his shield up.

  The Brute is currently immune to that effect.

  Please try again later.

  What a polite interface. Apparently it just rendered all spells useless, not just damage spells. She smirked and readied herself for once the others had killed the zombie. Weaken, Slow, and Suffocation down, she soothed her pet, who seemed to be getting quite riled up the longer they fought. It wasn’t even as if the Brute was skilled, he was just tough as steel and sort of...thick.

  She’d only just begin to see any sign of blood in his wounds. Otherwise they just seemed to be hacking away at calloused layer upon layer of flesh. The thought made her gag.

  “Don’t suppose anyone got any sort of grenade launcher abilities when they hit twelve?” Sinister ground out the question with a nice dose of sarcasm through clenched teeth.

  “No.” Devlish
grunted. Again. It was all he knew how to do when he fought. “But I do have a defensive trick or two I’ll activate after the next blobs to give you a bit of a breather. My life tap is nothing like yours.”

  “Okay.” Sinister answered shortly, and since Murmur’s abilities were easily nailed down until the Brute hit twenty-five percent, she watched her friend out of the corner of her eye.

  The blood transfer flowing from the Brute to her was far more solid than it had been when they fought in the caves, as was its dispersal back to everyone else. It spun through the air like the blood was being carried as small red clouds along a current no one else could feel.

  Fascinating, but kind of gross.

  “Two percent to go,” Beastial called out, and everyone eyed the Brute, bracing for anything.

  The shield dropped, now putrescent green, and this time three zombies spawned. And even more of those bloody globules than the second wave.

  This time Murmur was ready, and Mez’d the first one immediately. The second she got before it could shamble too far, and the third she barely nabbed before Merlin ran into it as he fled from the globule that seemed to be much faster than the last batch.

  “Watch the radius.” She reminded the group, except it was far easier said than done. Murmur released her AOE stun, fluxing the mobs into a momentary standstill to buy the group a little bit of time.

  “Who was doing alchemy? We really need some potions.” Murmur barely jumped out of the way of exploding ichor. Her pet wasn’t so lucky. His health was woefully low, but she shook her head at Sinister’s inquiring glance. It wasn’t worth letting one of them die to save her stupid pet. Her stun brought them relief a couple more times and finally the barrier dropped. The moment it did, Devlish surrounded himself with a pitch-black aura for about ten seconds. During that time, the big beast’s health dipped nicely. Sin sighed with relief, pushed up the sleeves of her robes, and began applying her DoTs to heals again.

  Murmur alternatively debuffed and nuked, determined to use up the last vestiges of her mana.

  When Dev was just below fifty percent and the rest of them were hovering around forty, the massive vulgar blimp finally heaved its last breath. Dev yanked his axe out of its stomach where he’d finally managed to embed it good and proper, and the foulest stench filled the air as green and red goop began to dribble out from its stomach.

  A slow rumbling made the ground tremor.

  “Get back!” Havoc yelled, but Beastial and Devlish weren’t fast enough.

  The hulking gut it had taken them twenty minutes to hack through exploded like one of the globules the Brute had produced, showering them all in pus, viscera, and blood.

  Murmur never believed a virtual representation of herself could puke in a game world.

  Until right then.

  The Brute has been slain.

  “Oh my god.” Sin’s breath came in ragged gasps as she tried not to inhale any of the goop’s miasma. “Oh, the smell. I can’t.”

  He has been vanquished for the first time, by the guild Fable.

  Murmur wiped the back of her mouth with her hand after emptying the contents of her pretend stomach. She was satisfied to see that everyone else was also sick.

  Well, everyone else except for Havoc, who was standing the farthest away.

  You know not what you’ve unleashed.

  “Let’s get out of here.” Sin looked pale. Her otherwise purple tinged dark skin had a slightly lilac undertone.

  But Murmur stopped her. “Apparently we’ve really done it now and unleashed something frightening, although I doubt it smells worse than what we just encountered. Frankly, I don’t think we were supposed to fight this here. I think we were making too much noise, and it noticed we were here.”

  Merlin blinked at her, and she didn’t know if she should tell him he had a glob of something hanging right in the middle of his forehead from his hair. “I guess we were a bit loud after those skeletons. Pretty sure mobs aren’t too fond of us laughing after massacring a heap of them.”

  “Damn it! Why can’t one of you be a damned water mage!” Sin’s eyes were wide, and her voice held a note of hysteria.

  “Hey, Sin.” Beastial waved a hand in front of her face. “We can check if the mobs have repopped upstairs if you like. I’ll come with you. We’ll let the others know what we find out.”

  Sin nodded, the tension leaking from her shoulders. The two of them headed back up the stairs, Sin gingerly stepping over acid puddles on the floor.

  “That was unexpected.” Merlin finally found the blob floating above his forehead and flicked it off. “Sin is usually so fierce.”

  Murmur turned and raised an eyebrow. “We literally just got covered in guts. What’s there to be fierce about?”

  Beastial: Okay. No repops yet. Quick rinse time.

  They headed up to rinse themselves off at the shoreline. It was bright outside, and the sun shone down in brilliant waves, scintillating like Belius’ eyes. Murmur frowned, wondering why she thought of him, but all that ever did was make her curious about why the world just felt like it was real. He was her trainer, even if he often behaved suspiciously.

  Sin brightened considerably once the smell was mostly gone and they headed down into the dungeon again, ready to delve down deeper.

  “Shit.” Devlish rushed over to the slowly rotting corpse. “Forgot to loot.”

  He froze for a moment in a half crouch that very delicately avoided the worst of the gore on the ground. “Necro robe, caster. Maybe healer two handed mace? And one of those crystals and stones again for you Mur. Oh, and a lot of cash for us.”

  The cha-ching sound resonated through the room as a hefty sum of gold landed with each of them.

  Veranol: What the fuck guys? What are you killing without us?

  Devlish: We sort of got jumped and almost all died.

  Sinister: You don’t even understand the smell that poured out of its body guys... seriously. You don’t want to know.

  Rashlyn: We’re so beating you to fifteen now. And then we’re going to own that castle thing.

  Mur moved forward and grabbed the Midia crystal. This one was similar in appearance, but was tinged a smoky black color in the middle. Another smooth black rock, another of those memories. Except this time Murmur decided she wanted some answers before she forked it over.

  “How come that’s a necro robe?” Sinister asked Havoc, and Murmur could hear the slight hint of irritation in her friend’s voice.

  Havoc just laughed. “It’s got a plus two percent to summoned undead stats on it. It’s not huge or anything, but it’s nice along with one Intelligence. What makes your mace a healer mace?”

  Sin just looked at him. “You can’t even wield a two-handed mace. Besides, it’s got plus one Wisdom on it. So it’s mine, since you all know I need wisdom.”

  “Well, we weren’t going to say anything.” Merlin only just hopped out the way, avoiding a smash of said mace.

  “Keep it down.” Devlish motioned across his lips. “This back room probably doesn’t hide anything, but since I think it’s where he came from and where he threw that half-eaten rib cage from. It might be an idea to just watch what we’re saying and how loudly we’re doing it.”

  Even Murmur felt a bit ashamed. Usually she was the first one to bark out orders, but she had so many thoughts going on in her mind at once, that it just didn’t feel like it had such a high priority when all of these adventures were just small fry. “Thanks, Dev.”

  The room they walked into was huge. Its stone floor was roughly cobbled, and in the middle sat a huge carved slab. On top of the slab lay half butchered remains, and over the fireplace cut crudely into the opposite wall was a body on a spit.

  Luckily, the fire had subsided to burning embers, but still—as real as Somnia was, this was downright spooky.

  Dried blood stains marked the path from hooks embedded high in the stone walls. Skin, blood, and guts stained the walls and the floors. And right next to the slab sat a massive
chest.

  The metal was dulled, with spots of rust here and there, and the bands around it appeared to be made out of something hardier, but Murmur couldn’t place the lifeless grey metal. She moved toward it, frowning, but Devlish held out a hand to stop her.

  “We don’t know what it is.”

  Murmur rolled her eyes. “It’s a chest.”

  “Yes, but—” Devlish gestured to everyone’s slowly-drying clothes. “What’s inside it?”

  Havoc shrugged. “Guess there’s only one way to find out. There’s no lock, so if we all stand back, my pet can probably open it. If he dies all it costs me are some bone chips, and after that haul from the previous passage, I’m set for life.”

  Devlish shrugged and moved back just shy of touching the grimy wall. “I’m not a fan of leaving to wash goop away again.”

  “None of us are, idiot.” Sin moved to stand by Murmur, leaning her head on her shoulder. Murmur absentmindedly patted her best friend’s hair. They all watched intently as Havoc also distanced himself before sending his pet in.

  Cringing as the skeleton approached, they all blinked when it flipped the lid and nothing happened except that it banged down against the other side with a strange metallic clank.

  “Well, I was expecting something more along the lines of boom!” Beastial gestured with his hands.

  Murmur crept closer with Sinister lagging behind clutching at her left arm.

  Bending down, Murmur shook her arm free and picked up a rather large silver box, engraved with filigree designs. “’Hold me close and you will see, clear the dungeon, set me free.’”

  She snorted. “Fantastic, a riddle.”

  Beastial shrugged. “Considering we were thinking of clearing it anyway.”

  Murmur shoved the thing into her inventory, worried at first that it was too large, but it went in without a problem. “Seriously, the immersion is only broken by how much shit I have in my bags.”