Darkness Named

by Riley S. Keene

  But there was nothing.

  She adjusted her perspective, looking up. There was a terrifying Zeni Boss from dARkness: Online that was a giant long-haired bird-cat monster. It had been no challenge for Koest and her arrows, as the fight was balanced for melee combatants. In this world, however? It would destroy her. Not only did she not have a bow—or any proper weapon for that matter—but its attacks would obliterate her meager HP bar if she failed to dodge its giant flailing claws.

  It was as she was considering how the speed and responsiveness of her chair might factor into such a fight—or, more likely, lend to her escape—that there was a roar of challenge. The ground about ten feet away erupted, throwing bits of rock and dirt into the air.

  A large creature emerged from the earth, flying through the air with its jaws open.

  It was descending right on her.

  Tanisha yelped and ordered her chair to move.

  It wasn’t a Zeni Boss—it was a rock lizard.

  The rock lizard was one of the lowest level boss monsters in dARkness. After it hadn’t shown up during her first hour of mining, Tanisha had kind of assumed it wouldn’t. That maybe Otekah had removed the creatures that spawned to keep spammers from gathering tons of resources and then selling the account to the highest bidder. But apparently not.

  It was a huge reptile, with broad forelimbs tipped with burrowing claws that were three times the size of the finger-length fangs that filled its maw. The creature’s skin wasn’t just pebbled with scales, but also with actual pebbles. It was made from sand-colored stone, much like the ground under her mech.

  Despite the speed of the chair, one of the creature’s forelimbs clipped the mech’s rear right leg. Tanisha struggled to keep her seat as the chair buckled. She refused to slow down though, so she shifted her body weight to regain its balance. Luckily, she got clear enough that her HP bar was untouched by the attack.

  The creature hit the rocky earth she was occupying a moment before, and there was another explosion. Dirt and gravel erupted from the ground, and when the dust cleared, the creature was gone. The place where it landed shifted for a moment as the ground-up dirt the creature left in its passing fell into place, sealing the opening.

  “So, you’re just as annoying in the flesh as you are in the game. Because if I could actually reach you, this might be too easy, right?”

  Tanisha reviewed her options. She could run. A rock lizard was no small threat, but it was designed to be a player’s first encounter with force-spawned monsters. Generally. It also dropped living stone, which was an extremely useful resource.

  “Right. Fighting.” Tanisha had her pickaxe in hand. All of her other tools were inaccessible, since they were in her clay pot. Which, while it had seemed like a great idea at the time, was pretty damn inconvenient now. If she ever got around to crafting an actual weapon, she’d need to not make it useless just to save inventory.

  Just the same, Tanisha could make the pickaxe work. As long as it stayed intact.

  “This is fine,” she said, only slightly sarcastic. Separated from the ground by the stabilizing influence of the chair’s legs, she couldn’t even feel the vibrations in the ground to tell her which direction the rock lizard might be coming from. “I just have to kill this thing with a pickaxe I’ve been using for almost an hour. That’s, you know, fine.”

  The creature emerged from the ground right beside her. It didn’t jump this time, but just slid out of the earth like it was bad clipping. Tanisha knew what was coming, but she couldn’t avoid the attack. It lunged forward, and even though she had already started moving, she felt the sting of pain that alerted her of the damage. The rock lizard’s toothy face passed through her leg with its jaws snapping, and the red bar in the corner of her UI lost a huge chunk. It was a lot strange to feel pain in her leg, since it had been at least a decade. But she couldn’t dwell on it. Tanisha kept her head in the game and moved, pickaxe raised and ready.

  As she brought the weapon down, it passed through the rock lizard with just a tug of resistance. The number that jumped out of the creature was twelve, and Tanisha smirked in satisfaction. Tools did additional damage to creatures of the appropriate type in dARkness: Online. She wasn’t entirely sure if that had been a feature at the start, or if it was patched later. But seeing the damage double gave her hope that she could pull this off.

  She took another two swings, and then backed away rapidly. There was no need to risk getting a fourth hit against the creature. At least, not when her HP bar was at risk.

  As she backed off, the lizard reared up. It opened its maw and hissed at her. With its jaws open, she could see the source of the sound. It looked like a rock, the size of a basketball, spinning rapidly against another chunk of solid stone. The combination created a rasping hissing noise. A little fountain of granules of ground-down stone sprayed from its maw like saliva. It stittered towards her, lunging again with bared fangs.

  This time, she was ready. It failed to surprise her enough to land the attack. Tanisha maneuvered the chair, letting the cone of attack pass by on her left side. As soon as its jaws snapped shut on air, she smacked its flank with her pickaxe.

  She couldn’t remember for certain how long she had before it struck again, but she knew it was more than three hits worth. Red twelves bounced out of the creature’s hide where her pickaxe swept through it. She counted them out loud.

  Her HP bar was still slightly above half, and so she decided to prepare to accept the rock lizard’s next attack if she had to.

  “One, two, three,” she said as the weapon hacked away at the creature. Her voice rose in anticipation with each number. “Four! Five! Six!”

  The creature turned and Tanisha couldn’t get out of the way in time. She cried out in fear as its mouth snapped shut around her torso. The bite was large enough that, had the rock lizard been a real creature, it would have been able to drag her from her chair. Instead, it was just a tug of pain and the creature passed through her to fall to the ground. The chunk taken out of her HP bar was substantial, but not the end of the world.

  Tanisha descended on the creature with her pickaxe. Her attacks approached ferocity. The gamer part of her brain was more than willing to accept its damage output in exchange for her own, some unfounded confidence telling her that she would win the trade. But the normal human part of her lingered on the pain of its teeth closing around her flesh. She wanted to avoid that. And, thinking logically, she didn’t know for certain that she would have the chance to heal herself before the next time she came under attack.

  Better to not be walking around the False Lands one hit from death.

  As such, she landed five vicious strikes, and then moved. Her chair darted away from the creature’s snapping jaws, and it just missed one of the legs. Tanisha wondered if too much damage to the chair would be dealt to her HP bar instead… but she didn’t have time to worry about that now. It would be for a future experiment.

  She moved in and swept her pickaxe back and forth in a figure-eight pattern. “One, two, three—”

  The creature shattered. It cried out with one final grinding hiss, and then its pebbled skin disintegrated. The rock lizard hit the ground like a dirt clod, bits scattering away from it in all directions.

  “Alright!” Tanisha menaced the downed creature with her pickaxe. The tool was visibly damaged, with the stone bit chipped down and the rope fraying, but it still seemed usable for a bit. “That’s what you get for interrupting me!”

  She took a deep, stabilizing breath, and then opened her inventory. Halfway through the fight, she saw she gained a pickaxe skill. Which meant she should have leveled. She must have just missed the notification. And sure enough, navigating to the character sheet gave her the prompt to level up.

  Tanisha chose to increase her hunger again. Stability seemed the more prudent choice, but as the day had progressed, her hunger had drained faster than her stability. She didn’t know how much food she had “wasted” when she ate breakfast, since it h
ad topped off her hunger bar. And she really didn’t want to take up more inventory spaces by storing food so she could eat on the go.

  That done, Tanisha returned her attention to the dirt pile that was once a rock lizard. She dug into the creature’s gravelly corpse. There were six rocks she could recover, and she added those to her inventory. In addition, there were two chunks of ore, and then two lumps of living stone. If she wanted to invest some time in chasing the game’s tech tree, this was an important step.

  She looked around the scene of the battle. Tanisha hadn’t lost track of her location, but the sun was heading towards mid-afternoon. Time to go. Unless she wanted to be building her shelter by firelight, of course.

  Chapter 28

  On the ride back to camp, Tanisha tried to do some more simple math.

  She opened her inventory, not caring too much that it blocked her view. Sure, she was still close to the border between the rocky biome and the grasslands, but she hadn’t seen any signs of more rock lizards. And once she was gone from the zone, they wouldn’t spawn to aggro her.

  From her math, she could make eighty cut stone. That would make ten walls. Or eight walls and four units of roof. However much one unit of roof would actually cover. Once that was done, though, she would only have a handful of stones left.

  As such, she collected stones from the grasslands, stopping and farming some up as she went. It was easy for her to get the ones in her path already, and it supplemented her supply nicely.

  During one of these extra farming sessions, Tanisha heard a small sound from nearby. She immediately raised the stone she’d been putting in her inventory like a weapon. Not that it was going to do any effective damage to anything from this world. Well, it might, actually. Using her tools as weapons was a variation of hitting something with a rock, afterall. Maybe throwing one would work.

  But nothing emerged from the tall grass. The sound came again, and Tanisha frowned. She put the rock away and fetched her pot of tools. Her axe came to hand first, and Tanisha wasn’t mad at it. The axe was unused, meaning it would outlast even a high-health monster, if it attacked. Not that her first choice would be to stand and fight anything. Her health was pretty low, and she was honestly hoping to avoid confrontation.

  But she also didn’t want to be caught unaware.

  Her first instinct, once she was armed and ready—and her pot of tools was put away—was to call out. But these were the False Lands. Nothing here would be friendly, unless she somehow stumbled across another human. And that definitely wasn’t a human noise. Instead, she strained to listen for the sound again, keeping her hands down and ready to direct the chair away at a moment’s notice.

  The sound came again. It was something more like a whimper, rather than anything threatening. The noise was a soft keening sound that immediately put her teeth on edge. It wasn’t the sound of challenge or threat. But a cry for help.

  Her heart immediately ached at the thought of some poor fuzzy thing in need of assistance. Sure, she was a hunter, but she didn’t kill for the sport. She killed for the necessity. And there was no necessity in letting something suffer.

  There was, of course, the chance that this was some sort of trap. Tanisha squished her instincts to rush in and help, and instead crept forward as slowly as possible.

  The grasses ahead of her parted before the spindly legs of her chair. She easily found the source of the sound. It was indeed a small, fuzzy thing in need of assistance. It looked like some sort of trap had been spawned—or perhaps purposefully set?—here in the grasslands, and a tiny unfamiliar critter had wandered into it. The creature was only a foot tall, and almost humanoid. It had broad shoulders and a tail nearly the length of its body. The entire creature was covered in a dark brown fur that faded to black along its tail, except for a single patch beneath its chin, where its lower jaw was snowy white down to its throat.

  Its leg was caught in the trap, which looked vaguely like a tied snare. Tanisha didn’t remember seeing anything in the crafting menu that looked like this trap. So maybe it wasn’t purposefully set by another human. Regardless, it looked like the critter had been caught some time ago, as its leg was rubbed raw and hairless around the thin rope.

  “Hey,” she whispered, making a little shushing noise to try to calm the creature down. “Hey, little guy. Can you understand me?”

  The creature whirled at her, baring its fangs. They were a little out of proportion with its body, seeming far too large for the tiny creature. But the look in its eyes wasn’t anger or even violence; it was fear. Tanisha lowered her chair down, putting the axe behind her in her seat, so that she could hold up her empty hands.

  “Not gonna hurt you,” she said, trying to keep her voice soothing and calm. “I just want to help. Are you okay? Can you understand me?”

  The little creature kept his fangs bared, and it looked back and forth between Tanisha and the loop tied around its leg. It tried to back away to the furthest length that the tether would allow, but it wasn’t that long of a leash.

  “Okay. I’m going to climb down off the chair.” She tried to keep her tone low and nonthreatening. “If you bite my face, I’m going to be really upset. But that’s your nature. It will be my nature to defend myself, but we don’t have to hurt each other if we just both choose to not fight. Just be cool, okay?”

  Tanisha was certain her HP bar could take whatever attack this little creature could perform. At least long enough for her to lunge back into her chair. Unless it was like some wolverine with multiple attacks and incredibly over-tuned for its size.

  She hesitated for a moment, and then opened her inventory and put her axe into one of the few remaining open slots. Just so she could retrieve it easily. Then she climbed down off the chair. The creature’s fear seemed to wane a little once she was roughly eye level with it. Tanisha raised one hand in front of herself, both as a gesture to try and reassure it, and to put the hand in its path if it lunged at her as soon as she was in reach.

  There was a flash of motion, and Tanisha flinched, expecting the pain. Instead, there was a new quest on her UI. She frowned when she saw it, and stared at it until the text expanded out.

  Trapped Mustelan: Free the mustelan. You have located a trapped mustelan, a friendly creature who can help you on your adventures in the False Lands. Freeing it will raise your reputation with all mustelans, and give you the opportunity to befriend it, if you provide for its needs. To free the mustelan, examine the trap. Attacking it with a weapon may be necessary, or it might be solved by some manner of puzzle, depending on the trap.

  “Of course I’m going to free him,” Tanisha said, cursing quietly at the quest text. She kept her voice even and low, so as to not upset the creature more. “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m not a monster.”

  The creature watched her quiet outburst with curiosity rather than fear. When she turned her attention to it, its mouth was closed, hiding the fangs. He still looked wary, but it no longer seemed to be about to attack.

  Tanisha dragged herself a little closer, watching the bit of rope trailing off its wounded leg. She was trying to figure out where it came from, but there didn’t seem to be one. The rope just seemed to vanish into the grass. She wouldn’t be able to untie it and let the creature run. Which only left one option. She’d have to cut it free.

  “Okay, little one. Please. Don’t panic.” Tanisha opened her inventory. “I’m going to have to cut the line. To do that, I need a weapon. I promise, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  She pulled her axe out of her inventory, and the creature’s fangs came out again. Tanisha made soothing shushing noises at it, but that just seemed to agitate it more. When it started to struggle against the bond again, Tanisha just decided to move quickly. The creature whimpered as the rope cut into its flesh. A scab ripped open, and a trickle of blood darkened its fur.

  “Alright, alright. This isn’t for you.” She closed the rest of the distance, holding the axe in front of herself. Despite her reassura
nce, she was ready to use it to swat the creature away if it lunged. “I’m just going to cut the rope and then put it away again.”

  She tried to make the cut one smooth gesture, the axe rising and descending quickly onto the rope. But the rope didn’t part that easily. It split and frayed, sure, but it stayed intact. The creature let out a yelp of alarm and tried to flee, turning away from her and clawing at the ground with its arms.

  Tanisha immediately feared for its leg, and so she hacked at the rope again before it could damage its own limb. The rope made a snapping sound as her axe connected a second time, and one of the coils gave way.

  But the blasted thing was still holding. She didn’t wait before striking again. If she delayed even a little longer, the creature might dismember itself in fear.

  The third strike was enough, and the rope parted. With a snarl, the mustelan tumbled away at the sudden loss of tension. It sat up and looked back at her. Tanisha quickly opened her inventory and put the axe away. She raised her empty hands, shimmying them back and forth to show they were non-threatening.

  “See? All gone.” She smiled. “I told you I didn’t want to hurt you. And you’re free now, okay?”

  The creature jumped to its feet and started to dart away. Tanisha settled back to watch it return to the wild. In the upper corner of her UI, the quest to free the creature completed and vanished.

  As soon as it did, though, the mustelan drew up short. It turned back towards her, slowly, and sniffed the air.

  “Is that how it works?” she asked, keeping her soothing tone of voice, even if her words were directed at herself, instead of the furry creature. “I help them, and I’m a monster… but the quest finished and then I smell like a friend?”