by Hugo Huesca
Mark opened a private chat again. “What an idiot,” he said. “If something kills him without us, he’ll probably blame us. Again.”
“Then we better hurry,” Lisa said, sighing. She returned to the party chat and said, “Well, let’s not keep the man waiting. Omar?”
“Ah, sure,” said the new kid.
Sleet dragon breath raised a small fogbank as it struck the water and left a jagged ice road for them to use. Omar went first, then Lisa, and Mark at the end. After the dwarf had jumped into and past the waterfall, the path cracked and collapsed.
Rylan Silverblade waited for them at the end of a small natural cavern, filled with eroded stone covered by moss and lichen so thick that Lisa could almost smell it. There was a heavy iron door in front of Rylan, with an engraved monster instead of knob.
“Is that a shark?” Mark wondered. It was way too pixelated to tell, but the creature seemed to have a siege weapon mounted on its back.
“Probably a new type of monster,” Lisa said. “We better hurry inside. An underwater fight would be terrible with half of us in heavy armor.”
“Just shock them with thunder magic,” Ryan said as his Rogue worked through the lock and disabled a pair of pretty obvious dart traps. A pit trap, which couldn’t be disabled, was marked on everyone’s screen once the Rogue identified it.
“Mark, get this open,” Ryan ordered, stepping back as the heavy lock fell with a thud.
“Aye aye, Captain.” Mark jumped over the pit trap and charged the door with a bull-rush tackle. The impact threw the iron doors wide open with the deafening clang of metal hitting metal. “Hey guys!” Mark called, taunting the dark corridor that opened to receive them. “We’re home!”
As a response, a stream of imps flew out of the shadows as spiderlings flooded the walls and ceilings and headed for them.
The imps were annoying, but Lisa had enough experience dealing with them. They weren’t dangerous in small numbers, and they were barely intelligent, but they knew basic combat—they ignored Mark’s Fighter and Rylan Silverblade and headed straight for the casters, wielding those cruel tridents of theirs as their obscene songs came through the speakers of her computer.
“We need crowd control against the spiderlings,” Lisa advised Omar while her hands flew over her keyboard’s hotkeys and activated a couple of macros. Her Cleric was the team’s one man army against all things undead and demonic. Had she been running her main character, she would’ve used a mass banishment that would’ve sent the nasty critters back to Hell in a single strike.
Instead, her mid-level character activated a circle of protection to keep herself from getting swarmed, then enchanted her mace with a holy smite spell that made it glow like a blinding star, searing the darkness in its wake and turning several imps to smoke and ash with every swing.
A few steps in front of her, Mark set his tower shield on the floor and activated his challenge, an aura that forced any enemy passing him by to either attack him or suffer heavy penalties to their Spirit attribute. His axe wasn’t the best weapon to deal with swarms, but his Endurance was so high that his health points barely registered a tickle as the spiderlings covered his body with bites.
“I can do this all day,” Mark said while his character picked spiderlings off and crushed them under the weight of his boots.
“We don’t have all night, Mark, I’ve got a life,” Ryan said as he retreated past the dwarf’s shield. The Rogue was a glass cannon meant for infiltration, scouting, and dealing massive damage to singular, elite enemies. And when Ryan wasn’t the absolute best at everything, he got mad. “Hurry up and kill these stupid critters, new guy. Quick!”
“Sure, sure,” Omar said nervously. “What should I use? You’re all in my fireball area of effect!”
“No fireballs in an enclosed corridor!” exclaimed Lisa, Mark, and even Ryan in unison.
“Omar, Ed had a minor spell for dealing with weak swarms somewhere in his hotkeys,” Lisa hurried to say. “Something to do with a fog. It shouldn’t hurt us much, but it’s lethal for the spiders.” She swung her mace again, destroying three imps that were trying to strike her character in the back—as if she couldn’t see them perfectly with the top-down view of the screen.
Although, they wouldn’t know that, she told herself as Omar unleashed a freezing fog that engulfed the corridor for thirty seconds. Lisa’s HP went down by about a tenth of a percent. When the fog cleared, it revealed a corridor littered with the twitching bodies of the spiderlings.
“Finally,” Ryan muttered.
Lisa dispatched the last set of imps and laid down a mark of healing spell that recovered the party’s lost HP over the course of a minute.
After that, they hurried down the corridor, with Rylan Silverblade at the lead, scouting for traps under the cover of shadows. This dungeon had a low ceiling. According to the Quest-log, the leader was using it to smuggle drugs and cursed items into Constantina—not that anyone besides her bothered to read the quest’s descriptions.
It was marked as a medium-threat kind of dungeon, which meant the Boss at the end wouldn’t try to implement some of the nasty tricks the high-threat dungeons liked to pull, like collapsing the entire thing over their heads, or flooding the corridors, or simply picking up shop and running away before they could engage in battle. It was because of these tricks that many players avoided the high-level dungeons like the plague, but Lisa enjoyed the challenge, and didn’t mind spending a week or two chasing after a tricky Boss all over the map, because she knew that once she caught up with him, the victory was even more rewarding.
“There’s some shit-tier critters up ahead,” Ryan warned them. “Past that locked door. Now would be a good time for a fireball, actually. Mark, get it open so the new guy can have his time to shine, alright?”
“How nice of you, Boss,” Mark said as his dwarf bull-rushed the chamber’s iron door.
The chamber seemed to be a staging area for transporting the merchandise around. Lisa saw a couple disassembled carts strewn about next to iron-ringed barrels, with a small stream of water splitting the room in two. It was guarded by what seemed to be man-sized carnivorous plants, not that she had enough time to look before Omar waltzed in and unleashed a fireball rune that killed everything in sight.
Lisa and the others worked their way through the dungeon over the course of two hours. Some of the traps were quite devious, and Ryan wasn’t able to spot them all. The acid ooze that dropped from the ceiling and engulfed Mark when he stepped on a pressure plate had been especially annoying, because the dwarf lacked the Agility to get out, and although Lisa and Omar freed him before his HP reached critical levels, he lost most of his armor and weapons due to corrosion.
“Hah! What an idiot,” Ryan said while Mark burned health potions to withstand the lingering damage of the acid. Then the Rogue stepped on another pressure plate and the floor collapsed, leading him down a long chute that ended in another acid ooze.
“Whoever built this dungeon has a thing for oozes,” Lisa commented, ten minutes and many potions later, once they’d managed to get Ryan out.
“Remind you of someone?” asked Mark through a private chat so Ryan wouldn’t hear.
“I’m just saying.”
“No one built anything,” Ryan muttered. Lisa didn’t need to see him to know from his tone that he was fuming already. “Most dungeons are randomly generated, so this is all just shit luck and shit skill. Omar, please, next time you see an ooze freeze it with your damn ice, that’s how you kill them as fast as possible!”
“What about a fireball?” Omar asked timidly.
“Do you want dozens of tiny angry oozes? Because that’s what you get if you use fire against one… did you even read the wiki?”
“All right, guys, get ready. More junkers up ahead,” Lisa said, more to get Ryan’s attention away from Omar than because junkers ought to worry them.
Junkers, according to the database, were low-ranking demons above imps and below everyth
ing else. The Bosses summoned them from Hell itself to do their bidding. They were hunchbacked humanoids with a long set of claws instead of fingers, blind and deaf and butt-ugly. They detected prey through movement and smell, and if ignored could quickly take out a spellcaster, so the responsibility rested mostly on Ryan and Mark to keep them far away and manageable, which they did while Lisa and Omar blasted them to pieces using ice bolts and smites repeatedly.
They were neck deep in dead junkers when they realized they’d stumbled across the Boss Room, and only because they saw the tiny stone Seat hidden behind a giant cobweb.
In most normal dungeons, the Boss Room was the most important and luxurious single chamber around. It was the one with the Seat, the heart of the dungeon which, when destroyed, disabled most magical traps and the Portal. In this case, though, the Boss room was tiny, secluded, and partially flooded by a crack on the walls that let the water from the river above in. Cobwebs covered almost every inch, so much so that even the junkers got trapped sometimes. Ryan spent more time hacking the silver strands to pieces than actually fighting at all, and judging by his cursing, he was getting tired of it real quick.
“There’s the Seat!” Lisa exclaimed. “Quick, someone take it out—”
Of course, the Boss appeared right before they could make their move. The wall next to them exploded out of nowhere, and a creature so big it barely fit in the chamber rushed at them, long and terrible horns aimed their way and blazing red eyes shining through the darkness. Its skin was black and bulging with muscle, with precise stitching holding together the separate body parts, some of which had clearly been taken from different creatures.
Lisa yelped and barely had time to set a couple wards of protection against physical damage up before the giant undead bull smashed against Omar—the Wizard’s health halving with the collision—gored him straight through, and kept going. The bull smashed against the next wall and continued on, disappearing into the shadows while Omar’s HP kept dropping.
“What the fuck,” Ryan bellowed. “Move, you idiot!”
“I can’t!” Omar exclaimed through the sound of frantic keystrokes. “It stunned me!”
“It didn’t even say its speech,” Mark whispered.
The Boss fight was on—Lisa could tell by the change in music. She jumped after the Boss, already preparing a healing spell.
The bull had finally stopped in the middle of an entirely new room. The creature seemed to be grappling Omar down on purpose, right in the middle of an anti-magic circle, its field encapsulating both Boss and Hero like a translucent bubble.
What the hell? Lisa thought. That was one hell of a nasty combo. Anti-magic fields countered spellcasters hard, and worse yet, dying inside one caused a final death, in which the player not only lost the character but all its loot. Final deaths were represented in game-play by a fierce explosion.
“Get the hell out of there, you idiot!” Ryan exclaimed.
“I can’t, my spells aren’t working!” Omar exclaimed, almost in hysterics.
Lisa tried to use a healing command, but the anti-magic field dissipated the spell like it was nothing. For a bunch of smugglers, the creators of the dungeon had invested some serious gold in this trap. There are no creators, Lisa reminded herself. It’s supposed to be all randomly generated.
Since magic wasn’t working, she had her cleric draw her mace and charge at the giant bull.
It turned out to be one of the most resistant undead she’d ever fought. Her mace, usually a perfect weapon against undead, simply wasn’t heavy enough to deal with the bull’s enhanced body. Its Endurance was ridiculous, somewhere in the upper twenties.
“Get. Off. Him!” Lisa saw how the last dredges of Omar’s HP drained away. She tried to strike at the monster’s head, but the creature kicked at her almost without noticing her, and the Cleric flew away from the Circle and into the wall’s rubble.
“Do I have to do everything around here?” Ryan muttered as he and Mark entered the circle and rained blows upon the bull. This time, with the dwarf’s axe taking chunks out of grayish meat away with each strike, and Rylan Silverblade’s curved daggers tearing open tendon and joint, Lisa dared to hope that they’d be able to kill it in time.
Then the bull lifted the Wizard with one terrible bellow and smashed him back down again with all of its weight behind, several tons of bone and muscle. The Wizard’s remaining HP vanished and Lisa could swear for an instant that she could see the pixelated body split—
The explosion was so strong that, for a second, Lisa believed her computer screen was shaking for real. Pieces of debris fell from the ceiling and a cloud of dust obscured her top-down view, not that she was looking—instead, all her attention was on downing health potions and casting recovery spells.
The dust cleared after a few seconds to reveal the silhouette of the bull, its skull picked clean of skin by the force of the explosion, and the many wounds it had sustained clear on its undead body. It glanced stupidly at the broken magical circle, and then at Lisa’s Cleric. The monster raised a hoof and struck the ground.
“Oh, no you don’t,” said Ryan as his Rogue emerged from the dust at half-health. “Now it’s my turn. Mark, set a goddamn flank for me, right now!”
The dwarf rushed at the bull with his battered tower shield lifted high, striking at the creature with it while releasing a taunt shout at the same time.
Rylan Silverblade unleashed his combo.
That was the thing with Rogue characters. They were hardly useful against hordes, but against a single opponent they really shone. And if there was something that Ryan loved, it was being in the spotlight.
First, he unleashed a shadow strike straight from the front, both blades glowing purple as the Rogue flashed and disappeared before the bull had a chance to make a move, only to reappear a second later behind the boss. A smoking criss-cross slash appeared on the bull’s flank.
The boss tried to face the Rogue, but the taunt from Mark beat its Spirit and forced it to try to stomp the Fighter down while Rylan unleashed a sneak attack flurry from the back, purple light erupting from each strike. The Rogue then activated a shadow step followed by an eviscerate. Rylan disappeared in a puff of smoke and reappeared right atop the bull’s neck as his curved daggers glowed red. The bull tried to dodge out of the way, but its bulk made it too slow—the Rogue fell upon its flank as his weapons swung down at the same time with magically enhanced strength. There was a sound of flesh tearing and bone cracking and the creature’s head rolled on the floor, the light of its eyes slowly fading away.
Rylan Silverblade did a cartwheel and landed just before the bull’s corpse had time to fall.
“Damn,” Omar said. “You almost soloed the thing.”
“There. That’s how you do it,” Ryan said. Then, under his breath, “Bunch of fucking noobs, really. I don’t know why I waste my time with you.”
With the Boss dead, destroying the Seat was a trivial matter. Lisa did the honors with her mace. The dungeon slowly collapsed around them, the experience points slowly tricking in through a status bar on a corner of the screen as they ran out. The way Ivalis Online worked, they’d get the gold coins they’d earned from the wreckage a few hours after the fact, sent straight to their inventory by the Church.
That was how playing Ivalis Online worked. It was a very strange game, and Lisa couldn’t help but wonder about it. For a decade-old software, sometimes it could be quite realistic. Other times, it made no sense whatsoever.
Outside, back in the real world, it had gotten late. Diana would likely be home soon, drunk out of her mind, and hopefully alone. But in the meantime, the room was freezing and dark, as if the candlelight wasn’t enough to fight off the strange, sudden fear that threatened to overwhelm Lisa.
With one trembling hand, she flicked on the light switch.
Back in the War Room of the Haunt, Ed and Lavy studied the wreckage from the dungeon’s final room using a crystal ball.
“Sorry about your dungeon
, Lord Wright,” said the ball’s owner, a floating blue pufferfish with spikes protruding from its tough hide. Diviner Pholk was an abnatir, a kind of demonic inhabitant from the Netherworld. Pholk was young and timid and had spent most of his life studying. Ed was the first Dungeon Lord the abnatir worked for, and Pholk was visibly excited.
Ed couldn’t help but think of him as “the intern.”
“It’s quite alright,” Ed said. “It did what it was supposed to do. Still, please send a message to Klek and Kaga to get more acid oozes whenever they’ve got some free time.”
“Are the oozes part of your master plan?” Pholk asked, his giant black eyes bulging with amazement.
“Not really. I just really like them.” Ed shrugged and then tapped the crystal ball as if dealing with an old TV and trying to improve the reception. “Did you find the beam?”
“It was as you said, Lord Wright,” said the intern. “Using Master Lavina’s crystal and my personal detection spell, I was able to pinpoint a beam spell connected to each Hero. The spell is too advanced for me to figure out much about it, but it seems to be some kind of complex mixture of effects. Instructions and conditions, along with status updates and confirmations. Whatever it is, it involves many schools of spellcraft.” He said this with unmistakable admiration in his voice. “I’d give anything to talk with the person who designed it.”
Likewise, Ed thought.
“How did you know?” Lavy asked Ed. “About the beam.”
“I didn’t. Not exactly, at least,” Ed explained. “But there had to be some way the players control the Heroes from Earth, as well as a very good reason why the Inquisition is using gamers instead of trained Inquisitors to man them. You taught me that all spells need to connect with their target, so I figured there was some kind of magic involved and took the gamble.”
