“Yep. Looks pretty cool, right?”
“Reminded me of a bunch of bugs.”
Angie made a face. “Ew. I think of it more like water. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is, now that you can see it, you’re one step closer to being able to control and manipulate it. And that’s magic, bro.”
I nodded. Even if the skill was passive and didn’t really give me any immediate power, I felt incredibly grateful. It was the first good thing to come my way, aside from this secret fissure, since we’d been captured.
While my cellmates slept, I spent my next off-shift meditating on the mana. Eyes closed, I sat in the corner of my cell and studied the element for my allotted five minutes, then rest while my MP regenerated. Then I’d do it again.
Interestingly, the bars in front of the cell looked even more solid than the stone wall using Mana Sight. I supposed this meant they were magically reinforced. Made sense. If anyone was going to try to break out, they’d try the bars rather than the solid rock around them. In Mana Sight, the bars were like kevlar. Triple-weave, six-inch thick kevlar. But the walls, while obviously solid, seemed… less solid now. Less like solid rock and more like molten rock. The mana shifted and swirled and eddied, like water in a river. Maybe Angie was on to something with that analogy.
Passive Skill Leveled Up: Mana Sight
Congratulations, you have gained a level in the school Mana Sight! This is a passive skill that will be leveled both by use and as your mana pool increases.
Skill: Mana Sight
Type: Passive
Level: 2 (scalable)
Effect: 7% increase in ability for mana to illuminate surroundings and other mana sources
Cost: 1MP per 2 minutes
Oh cool, I could use it for twice as long before needing to regen now. I was getting to really enjoy that little rush of the first few skill levels gained. They came quickly at the start. I supposed they would come a lot more slowly as my levels increased. Hey, wait a minute. An impossible hope woke inside me. What if…
I pulled up my character sheet and scanned all my stats.
Character Name: Gideon, AKA Chipdip
Player
Level: 2
Race: Night Elf
Class: Civilian
Occupation: Scavenger
Agility: 11/11
HP: 100/100
MP: 5/5
Spirit: 10/10
Stamina: 18/18
Strength: 17/17
Unarmed
Unequipped
Skills and Attributes
Fleet of Foot (passive): Level 2
Hard Labor (passive): Level 7
Mana Sight (passive): Level 2
Night Vision (passive): Level 4
Outside the Box (passive): Level 3
You have 1 unassigned attribute point and 1 unassigned skill point
Oh yeah! I very nearly slapped my forehead. Duh! I’d totally forgotten that I had points to assign from my first level-up. I suppose I could forgive myself when I reflected on the time I’d had. Anyway, no use crying over spilled skill points. I cracked my fingers and stuck my tongue out the side of my mouth in concentration. At just 5MP, my mana pool was way too tiny for my liking, especially if I was going to develop this new skill. I assigned my attribute point in MP, bringing it to 6, and with my skill point I tried to level Mana Sight again.
Point Assignment Failed!
You have selected a passive skill. Passive skills can only be leveled through use.
I frowned. Man! I guessed I would just have to sit on the spare point for a while, since all my skills were passive. I’d been hoping my use of Mana Sight would have also increased my mana pool, or maybe my spirit stat, but no such luck. Ah, well. At least I’d leveled the skill once.
I was surprised to see how high I’d leveled Hard Labor. I’d been ignoring the notifications about it, finding them more annoying than helpful, after I’d realized the tangental effects on strength and stamina did not increase with each level. Still, I had to admit it would be almost funny how high I’d leveled those two stats, if I hadn’t had to deal with the reality of being imprisoned.
I wondered absentmindedly when I’d gain another character level. I knew we were grinding miniscule amounts of XP while we worked, but still, 20 hours a day, you know? It had to add up eventually.
As if prompted by the thought, a new screen appeared:
Level: 2
Total XP Required to ascend to Level 3: 300
Total Current XP: 178
Progress to next level: 59.33%
Huh. I guess the level stat hid all of this subdata, but I could access it by thinking about it with the menu open. Cool, I guess. I spent a few minutes toggling the other skills and found that they, too, hid subdata including skill descriptions and progress toward levels. I sighed. This sort of discovery of game mechanics should have been an enjoyale experience. It was hard to enjoy anything in here, though.
What was really interesting was the enchanted pickaxe.
“Whoa,” I murmured, turning it over in my hand the next day. By itself, it was just a simple tool, albeit with those hidden stats. But with Mana Sight I saw a beautifully crafted piece of ornate art. Cords of luminous mana threaded from tip to tip and all down the handle, flowing like water, pulsing like fireflies. Their weave was incredibly complicated. Was that what enchantment came down to in Hero Online? Glorified basket weaving?
Still in Mana Sight, I poked at the handle.
That’s when I “saw” myself.
I was a body of mana, just as I’d seen in the character selection phase, only I hadn’t known what I was seeing at the time. My fingers were glowing tendrils of light stretching from an arm of solid, pulsing mana. I gasped. It was beautiful.
“Dip? Yo! Chip!”
The sound of fingers snapping in my face pulled me back.
“Huh?” I shook out of the skill and blinked. Nemo and Meatloaf were both looking at me askance.
“Hey, dumbass,” Nemo said, “you having a bad trip? C’mon, keep working. Or they’ll shoot all our asses this time.”
Meatloaf nodded. “You feelin’ alright, bro?”
“Yeah,” I said, “yeah. Thanks. Sorry. Ok. Back to work.”
Ten minutes in I got a ping from Angie and headed back to the fissure, keeping my head down. As always, I glanced around to make sure no one was watching before I slipped inside. So far, so good.
“Ok, so how do I manipulate the threads?” I asked her.
She frowned at me. “Threads?”
“Yeah yeah, of mana. You know how it looks when you activate the skill? Like a bunch of tiny, really tightly wound ropes that slither all over the place like snakes, or like lines of ants crawling across everything?”
“I told you… just looks kinda like water to me. But glowy. I dunno. It was boring so I didn’t really look closer. I just wanted to pass the skill to you.”
I ran a hand over my face. She might be a total badass, but my sister was clearly not predisposed to be a great mage.
“Looks like threads?” she said. “Why don’t you just… you know, unthread them?”
I hadn’t considered that.
Activating the skill, I looked at the pickaxe and reached out to the mana inside it. It wouldn’t budge. I tried again and got nothing. It felt like calling a disconnected number. Just… nothing. I told Angie as much.
“So don’t try the pickaxe,” she said. “Seems simple enough to me. You said it’s enchanted, right? So its mana is probably all bound up. But bro, the stuff is everywhere.”
She was right. It was crawling up the very walls. I mean, it was the walls. It was some Matrix-level shit.
“Ok,” I mumbled, “so how do I…”
I walked to the far wall. It was fairly flat and not much bigger than a set of double-doors. Activating the skill again, I looked at the mana. She was right again. It wasn’t bound nearly as tightly as it was in the pickaxe. Maybe she was cut out to be a mage after all.
Taking a deep, steadying breath, I reached out with my hand and my mind, and grabbed one of the threads. I couldn’t have prepared for the jolt of electric-like power that shot up my arm.
“Holy shit!”
The shock thrust me out of Mana Vision and back into the darkness.
“SHIT!” I growled, trying to tug my arm away from the wall, but to no avail. My entire forearm was ensconced in the stone.
“Whoa!” Angie rushed to my side. “Whoa, Gid, what did you do?”
“I did what you said! I just reached in and grabbed a mana thread, and now I’m fucking stuck in the—GAHHHH!!!”
Damage Taken
-20HP
My forearm was being slowly crushed by the rock wall as it resumed its normal shape. My eyes shot open in shock as I heard the bones begin to crack.
“Activate the skill, Gid! Do it now!”
It was like she was yelling from a hundred feet away, but I did it. I attuned my mana with that of the wall again, and, seeing the threads, pulled my arm out.
“Geez!” Angie wiped a hand over her forehead. I was lying on the ground, cradling my broken arm. With the Cave of Wonder buff, it probably wouldn’t take long to heal, but it hurt like hell. Like a real broken arm. For the moment, I made my only goal to keep breathing and not pass out.
“You ok, bro?”
I nodded, my breath calming down. My HP was climbing steadily, and my arm was looking less like a twisted tree root and more like… well, my arm. “Yeah,” I finally said. “Yeah, I’m ok.” But something was off. “I don’t get it, though. Doesn’t make sense. If any low-level player can see and manipulate mana like that and literally pass through stone walls, why imprison a bunch of us in stone cells? Seems a bit…”
“Short-sighted?”
I nodded. “Yeah.” My MP had regenerated too, so I activated the skill once more and looked around the room. This time I noticed that most of the walls looked a good deal sturdier than the one I’d grabbed. I tentatively poked at some of the mana threads in the adjacent wall, and they didn’t budge. But when I poked the tricky wall again, they felt springy, like silly string.
“Ok,” I said when I’d popped back out. “Scratch that last bit. It’s not all stone walls that are the problem.” I pointed ahead of us. “Just that one.”
Angie scratched her head and strode to the wall. “Huh.”
Without warning, she pulled back a meaty fist and struck the stone.
THWACK!
“Angie! What are you doing?”
“Testing a hypothesis,” she grunted, pulling back for another strike.
CRUNCH!
This time the stone audibly crackled and began to crumble. I looked with Mana Sight and saw the threads had snapped, dripping and oozing their florescent contents from broken ends.
CRASH!
One more heavy hit, and Angie’s fist went through the solid wall. “Ok!” She turned to me with a big, fangy grin. “False wall! Who wants to see what’s behind it?”
We tore away at the loosened stone, now significantly weaker, until we’d cleared a hole large enough to fit through one after the other. Once we stood on the other side, we found ourselves in long, narrow tunnel.
“This place and its tunnels,” I muttered.
“You expected perhaps to find wide grassy fields deep underground?”
“It would be a nice change of scenery.”
She snorted and led the way. I didn’t complain. She was the tank.
After just a few seconds we reached the end. Two torches sprung to fiery life before us, one to either side of a tall, ancient looking iron door. A few steps led up to it. We paused, uncertain.
“Uh… ladies first?” I offered.
“Wimp.”
Angie climbed the steps and pulled at the door handle. With a great creak, it opened to us.
Congratulations!
You have discovered a hidden area: the Secret Dungeon of Thrannick!
Each elder god once maintained a number of secret realms. This realm once belonged to Thrannick, the elder god responsible for the passing of time and the changing of the seasons. He was bound by his brethren and cast out into the darkness as punishment for changing time to suit his own needs with no heed for nature’s course. After, his realms were invaded and infested by all manner of monstrous creatures.
Venture forth to slay the monsters herein at great risk, but with the potential for infinite reward.
My jaw hit the floor.
“Holy…”
“…shit!”
Angie and I looked at each other and laughed.
“Are you serious?” she said, eyes wide. “What are the odds, man? A dungeon? A hidden dungeon? Right here in the place we’ve been imprisoned?”
I shrugged. “Odds aren’t my game.” But as someone with a great interest in the humanities, I found the little glimpse of an explanation at the lore and mythology extremely interesting. I couldn’t wait to learn more. I was grinning like an idiot for the first time since logging in.
“So…” she looked at me, “we’re going in, right?”
“Oh, hell yes!”
We passed through the door.
Beyond it wound a long set of descending steps. Figures, I reasoned. The dungeon must be hidden below all of the natural caverns the Newlanders had camped out it, or else it would have already been discovered. I frowned. What if it had been discovered? What if they’d already cleared it? Probably had. Or worse—what if they’d set up camp inside, too, and we were just walking into a crowd of the stinking players, about to be slaughtered once more?
But then, there’d been that stone wall Angie had hacked through. Surely that wouldn’t have been there if anyone else had come this way before.
The prospect of being the first players to uncover a secret area filled me with a kind of excitement I hadn’t experienced in the game since character creation. This was what a VRMMORPG was supposed to be about. This was the good stuff.
The stairs kept going. A troubling thought nagged the back of my mind. “Angie, we, uh… we’ve been gone a long time…”
She paused just a moment, then doubled her pace. “Just a bit further. We have to see it!”
I wanted to, too. I was just afraid of the beatings we’d catch when we showed up after going missing a quarter of an hour.
“Here!” she called up to me. I shook my head and raced down the last few steps to catch up to her at another iron door. Before I could object again, she pulled it open. The weighty thing clanged against the wall, making me jump. Then we stepped through.
The space it upon up into was beyond enormous. Imagine an enclosed stadium, then link up ten more of those bad boys all in a row, and double it again on the side. That’s what it felt like. Even as I swiped away a notification that I’d just gained level 5 in Night Vision, I gaped, staring into the inky darkness. There was no end in sight.
“Wow,” Angie breathed.
I nodded. She looked at me and smiled.
“Well, c’mon,” she said, striding forward. “Let’s find some mobs!”
“Ok, but,” I followed her with caution, “let’s not stray too far, alright? We can come back.”
“Yeah, yeah, sure. Ooo!”
She stopped and crouched low, looking up. I looked up at the sound of flapping, like bat wings, but slow.
“Get down, bro!”
“Oh!” I started to crouch behind her, but the thing was just too damned fast. It was on me before my knees could find the ground, and it flapped back into the air clutching me under the armpits. “Gahh!”
I looked up and saw nothing but long, dark fur waving in the air above me. My shoulders ached from the pincher-like grips, dinging off an HP for each arm. Dammit!
Giant Cave Bat
Level: 4
Race: Monster
HP: 175/175
Stamina: 30/30
Strength: 20/20
Attack: -1HP min, -50HP max
Giant Cave Bat??? Why could
n’t I have started with a nice, normal-sized bat? Or even medium? Had I missed the upsell? Geez! This level-4 thing was going to murder me!
“Gideon!” Angie’s voice drifted up to me from below. Crap. She already sounded far away. The bat-thing pumped its wings, straining with the effort. I watched its stats as stamina drained down, point by point. Huh. I guess it took a lot of juice to carry me. Too bad it hadn’t tried to pick up my sister. It wouldn’t have made it more than a few feet.
“I’m ok!” I called back to her. “I think,” I muttered. More like for now. What was going to happen when this thing got to wherever it was going? Or maybe worse, ran out of stamina and just dropped me from the cavern roof?
“Can you fight it?” she called.
Helpful, Angie. Thanks. All I had on me was the goddamn pickaxe. I hefted it and whacked the creature in the belly.
HP: 150/150
Not even a ding. Zilch. Zero.
“No!” I called back, my voice unnaturally high. Panic was creeping in. I hated heights anyway. It was probably for the best it was so dark in here. Who knew how high up I was?
Angie was cursing from the ground, but she couldn’t help me. I was far away. I watched the bat’s stamina continue to drop. 20. 19. 18. It was like a fucking countdown to my impending death by elevator-shaft suicide. Brilliant.
Maybe because I couldn’t think of anything else to try, I activated Mana Sight. As before, my senses shifted to the hidden world of luminous, threaded things. The bat’s body reminded me of my own, though it glowed a bit less brightly. Because it’s a mob, maybe? The threads that made up the thing were enclosed in some kind of transparent shell. It reminded me of an illustration of a cell. All the coding and the important stuff was inside, protected by the cell wall. That gave me an idea.
Quest for Vengeance Page 10
