Fangs looked blandly at him. “I’m not the leader.” Then he turned toward me. “Gideon is.”
Everyone looked at me. My virtual mouth, god bless the developers, went as dry as tree bark.
“You mean Chipdip?” Meatloaf punched me in the arm. “Yeah, I’d follow this crazy sunabitch. He’s the one found the dungeon anyway, isn’t he?”
Jane nodded. “I’ll follow you, Chip.”
“Me too.” I looked up and saw Angie smiling at me. Back in the melee row, her two cellmates shrugged and nodded. If I was good enough for her, I guess I was good enough for them. Geez. That was Angie. Loyalty everywhere she went.
“Angie.” I raised my hands in protest. “I really think it ought to be you. Don’t you think that—”
“No, you said it yourself. I’m the tank. I can’t be out in front drawing aggro and also in the back plotting strategem at the same time. I’ll be your, uh, consigliare, if it makes you feel any better.”
I grinned. “Ok. You’ll have to call me Don though.”
“Fat chance.”
I got a notification that Angie had extended invites to everyone with us into our shadow party, and had nominated me captain. Everyone voted. Finally Nemo sighed. He was the last one left.
“Fine!” He threw his hands up. “I’ll follow the dipshit. But I swear to God, Chip. You get me killed, and I will murder your ass.”
“You know,” Meatloaf said, “this is one of the only places on Earth you could actually follow through with that threat, man.”
I grinned.
“We’re not on Earth,” Fangs said softly. “Listen.”
We fell quiet. The sound of chittering and many-legged things was approaching.
“Get ready,” I said. “Weapons armed. Nobody do anything stupid. Let’s grind some fucking XP.”
Fangs led the way. Meatloaf and Nemo followed, our melee fighters. Next came Angie. I flanked her, not knowing quite where to put myself. Our ranged fighters—Gemma, Glitch, and Jane—brought up the rear. We were armed with homemade weapons scavenged from monster parts, not armored at all to speak of, with precious few combat skills and ridiculously low levels—Fangs and Jane were the only level 3 players in the group—but we were a party. We’d made it happen.
“Mobs ahead,” Fangs murmured.
“Yeah, no shit.” Nemo gripped his Elder M&M. The larger weapon looked comical in the hands of the dwarf, but he had the highest strength stat for all his time working in the mine.
“If these are Cave Crawlers, their weak spot is right in the middle of their mouth,” I called, “But you can stomp on or stab the smaller ones.”
“Right behind the head,” Angie added.
I looked at her and nodded, sharing a half-smile. If I was really going to lead this ragtag party, there was no one else I’d rather have as my lieutenant.
“Look alive, shits!” Nemo charged forward to meet the first mob to come into our line of sight. He raised his M&M to his shoulder and plunged it into the mandibles just as the thing screeched its battle cry. “Hah!”
Fangs had circled around its flank, and he fell on its back, stabbing behind the head. It died in seconds.
Your Party Has Defeated An Enemy
+3XP
“That all you got?” Nemo kicked the corpse. “C’mon!”
“That’s one of the small ones,” Angie muttered.
I wiped the smirk from my face. “Good job, guys. Stay alert. I have a feeling there’s more on the way. And we’ve noticed these things like to hang around in—”
The snarl of angry chittering surrounded us, hemming us is from every direction. Everyone in the party took a step toward the center.
“—groups,” I finished, my throat going dry.
“Shit,” Angie muttered.
“Alright,” I yelled, “new formation! Range fighters, get in the middle and face out! Melee, surround them with Angie and me. Make a circle. Now!”
There wasn’t time to argue, not even for Nemo. Gemma, Glitch, and Jane came forward and the rest of us formed a ring around them, raising our weapons defensively.
A sea of pincers came into view. Some big, some little, but vastly more of them than there were of us.
“Pick your target,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. I was facing a mid-sized Crawler from the look of it. I checked its stats and took a deep breath. 100HP. We were more or less evenly matched. “Let them come to us! Do not break the circle!” Our only chance was to maintain a wall of stabbing, slashing weaponry. If we opened a gap and let them in, we were done for.
“What about range?” an unfamiliar voice called. I looked over my shoulder and saw Gemma, the elf, her spear-like M&M held high.
“You have more reach. Try to hold onto your weapons and stab out from in between us as long as you can! You can throw as a last resort, but then you’ll have to retrieve. Could get tricky.”
She nodded. “Stabbing it is. Find a window, guys.” The three of them lowered their weapons and angled them out toward the Crawlers from in between the melee fighters.
Good, I thought, happy to see her taking leadership of her section.
They fell on us like hungry dogs.
But we were hungrier.
“Gaah!” Nemo stabbed another, his aim true, but it was a bigger Crawler. The thing closed its pincers and wrested the weapon out of his hands. “Shit, I’m unarmed!”
“Hang on!” Jane plunged the tip of her spear forward from behind him, catching the Crawler in its spider-like eyes. The thing screeched and backed away, fumbling its hold on the M&M but not releasing. She stabbed again and it let it drop to the floor.
“Mine!” Nemo yelled, ducking down and sliding forward to grab the weapon. He just made it back to his place as the Crawler regrouped and attacked again, but this time Jane was ready. She stabbed between the mandibles with her spear, plunging deep. The mob had moved so fast it sank forward onto the shaft with its own momentum. Nemo landed the killing blow, stabbing down behind its head.
Your Party Has Defeated An Enemy
+10XP
Sweet, I had leveled! Windows began appearing all over, threatening to obscure my sight. I willed them away impatiently. Now was definitely not the time!
My own Crawler made a move for my left leg. “Come here,” I growled, willing mana to flow into my M&M. I couldn’t get a clear shot; it moved way too fast! I had to jump to avoid getting my ankle snapped off, and I came down on its head, the Crawler bucking beneath me. It was more to keep my balance than to attack that I drove the tip of my weapon down, but it sank satisfyingly into monster flesh, right behind the head. The mana power-up landed me a crit and the thing wriggled pitifully, unable to get away.
“Somebody put this thing out of its misery,” I called over my shoulder.
“Gladly.” From behind me, Gemma knelt down and thrust her spear into the mob’s mouth, killing it instantly and pulling in yet another 5XP for everyone.
“This is working,” I said. “Try to team up, melee and range! Most of them should go down with just 2 or 3 well-placed hits.”
“So you say,” Angie grunted. The tank was facing off against the biggest Crawler I’d seen yet. She’d clearly already scored some hits but the thing looked tough as hell. She stabbed, it parried. I hadn’t seen that before, either. The mob was acting a little more intelligently than the others. The gamer in me wanted to pause everything and read its stats, but I already had another Crawler of my own to deal with. Two, in fact. They were getting more brazen and beginning to swarm us.
“There’s too many!” Glitch yelled.
“Just keep stabbing,” Nemo growled back.
Just keep stabbing, just keep stabbing, just keep stabbing, stabbing, stabbing… Dory’s song fluttered through my head and I almost laughed.
“FUCK!” I was bit again. A small one, thank goodness, so maybe I would escape the debilitating bleed debuff if I was very, very lucky. I stabbed it behind the head and it let go, glaring at me and squealing li
ke an angry pig. Thanks for the target, I thought, pulling out the tip of my empowered M&M and plunging it back in between its mandibles. It gave one last death-rattle and fell over, leaving room for the next to crawl over its body and launch itself at me.
“Gah!” Gemma hit it with her spear, missing the critical soft spot but deflecting its attack. It landed in a coil and sprang back to its many legs, crawling toward me again with renewed energy.
I took a breath and hefted my weapon again. “Come at me, bitch.”
I don’t know how long we fought, or if we defeated them all or if in the end some of them gave up and slithered away, but eventually the attacks slowed, then stopped altogether. When it was done we all slumped to the ground, panting, exhausted.
“Everyone ok?” I called, my voice wan.
“Ask me again when I have enough stamina to answer,” Gemma said. I laughed. She did too, and soon we were all sharing a good, deep, relieving belly laugh.
We’d survived.
I took a moment to call up my stats and read all the notifications I’d muted. Damn, there were a lot! The gist was that I’d netted 70XP for my role in the fight and from the party, and had broken into the next level.
You Have Leveled Up!
You have reached Level 3! You now have 1 unassigned attribute point and 1 unassigned skill point. Choose well, as these choices cannot be undone. You will reach level 4 in 380XP.
You have been assigned 1 attribute point in mana.
Not bad! I mentally assigned the attribute point to spirit, bring my mp and spirit up to 8 and 12, respectively. I sucked my teeth, not sure if I’d made the right choice. I didn’t like the discrepancy between them being that wide. But my skills so far demanded mana for duration and spirit for power, and with a party at my back, I reasoned duration was less important. I could strike hard in a fight and then let my MP recharge while everyone else took their shots.
I set aside the spare skill point just as I had with the first, bringing unassigned skill points to 2. Fine. As soon as I got a skill that could be manually leveled, I was going to level the shit out of it.
Passive Skill Unlocked: Strategy
Any idiot can rush in, but it takes a strategist to plan ahead. Congratulations, you have gained the passive skill Strategy! This is a passive skill that can be leveled with use and with attribution points. It is a sister skill to Battle Planning, which can be leveled with attribution points, and Outside the Box, which can only be leveled through use.
Skill: Strategy
Type: Passive
Sister Skill: Battle Planning, Outside the Box
Level: 1 (scalable)
Effect: 5% increase in likelihood for party plans to succeed
Speak of the devil! This was exactly the sort of skill I could use right now, and I could level it with my spare points! I dropped both into Strategy at once, bringing it to level 3 and increasing my likelihood for party plans to succeed by 9%.
It took some time for everyone’s stats to return to normal. Most of us wandered around the corpses looking for drops.
“This loot sucks,” Nemo said.
“What you got?” I ambled toward him.
He frowned. “Just a bunch of legs. Some bug meat. C’mon. Where’s the real shit? Gold? Weapons?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know about gold. But we can probably craft something useful with the legs. Maybe even weapons.”
He sneered. “Crafting. I knew you were a little bitch.”
Angie strode over, hearing our conversation, and bent down to snap a leg free from one of the downed Crawlers. “Did someone just call my brother a bitch? Reason I ask is, last I knew, that was my job.” She casually cracked the leg into pieces with one hand.
Nemo scowled at her. “You can’t scare me, ogress. I’m stronger than you.”
She flashed a big of fang in her subtle smile. “For now.”
“Alright guys, c’mon.” I stepped between them and snapped off another leg. “Really, I’ll see what I can do with these. Nemo, you can think of me as you please, I couldn’t care less. Angie, leave him be. There’s no point fighting each other down here when we have plenty of mobs to take out. Besides, I’d have thought all of us would have seen enough by now to lose any desire for PvP play.”
The reminder of our enslavement sobered everyone up.
“Unless it’s revenge,” Fangs muttered.
Angie leveled her cooking skill cutting up some very rough Crawler steaks and charring them over a pile of burning legs. I took another few legs and sat down by myself, having a look with Mana Sight.
“So you’re the mage in training, huh?”
A woman’s voice shook me out of it. I looked up and saw Gemma squatting beside me.
I chuffed and shook my head. “And you must be the one who taught Angie the skill.”
She shrugged. “Guilty. Sorry I don’t have much more to contribute; didn’t have a lot of time in the game before, you know.”
“Yeah.” I knew. “How’d you pick up Mana Sight?”
“There was this NPC where I started. Cool guy, sort of the town guide. Not that we had a town. Just a bunch of tents, you know. The basic setup.”
I frowned. “I was hacked before my first drop. I started in the middle of a forest, already surrounded by The Noose.”
She hitched her eyebrows. “That sucks. At least I had a few days of freedom before they scooped me up.”
That would have been nice, I thought wistfully. “So what, this NPC trained you?”
“Nah, not exactly. I mean he could have, if I’d wanted to work wood or catch fish. He was a glorified lumberjack with a little cabin on a lake. It must have been pretty nice. Before all us players showed up and started fucking things up, camping drops and putting each other in prison.”
“It sounds nice.” I’d had about enough forced social interaction in here to last a lifetime. A quiet life away from everyone, a cabin on a lake, with trees and fish and peace and quiet? Sign me up.
“Anyway, he had some skill scrolls. I bartered him for it. Went out and weeded his garden, if you can believe it. Simple stuff, real lowbie type quest. In exchange, he let me pick one beginner scroll. I saw one about mana and never looked back. What about you? You’ve got some skills, crafting and stuff. How’d you pick ‘em up?”
“Uh…” I shrugged, embarrassed. “I don’t know, really. They’re nothing impressive. Just… lowbie stuff.”
She cocked one eyebrow. “I saw you. You did something with your mana while you were fighting. Like you were channeling it into your weapon. It looked freaking awesome.”
“Haven’t you tried channeling the mana?”
She pursed her lips. “Hadn’t occured to me, I guess. I thought I’d just keep leveling Mana Sight until I got out of here and could get another quest or find more scrolls or something.”
I tilted my head. “Makes sense.” It did sound nice. Getting out. Getting quests. Scrolls. Normal player shit. “Here.” I handed her one of the Crawler legs. “Look with your skill and tell me what you see.”
She held it out in front of her and closed her eyes. “It’s like… it’s like muscles. Like muscle sinews. Only the sinews are all alive, independent of one another, gliding and rotating and moving all the time, and glowing. It’s beautiful.”
I nodded. That held up pretty well with my thread analogy. I reasoned she was paying more attention to the mana than Angie did. “Now, pick one of the sinews,” I said. “Concentrate on it.”
“It’s like… huh. Huh!” She opened her eyes. “Do you play a musical instrument?”
“Uh… a little guitar I guess. Like, when I was a kid.”
She nodded. “Yeah, ok! It’s like a guitar string. It vibrates. And the vibrations…” She closed her eyes again, concentrating. “…they send ripples through all the other strings. Like resonance.”
“That’s good,” I said. Damn, that was good. And it might have actionable implications. “Can you, uh, pluck the string?”
; She frowned. “How do you mean?”
“Well… I do it with my hand. But maybe just… you know, with your mind?”
She bit her lip, concentrating harder. “I don’t know. I’m not sure it… oh! Oh shit!” She opened her eyes again, a grin spreading on her face. “I did it! I plucked the string!”
Her smile was contagious. “Great! Then what happened?”
She shook her head. “Hell if I know! Let me try again.”
“Uh, guys?” Jane called. I turned to see her standing a few meters away, back by the entrance door. “We’ve got a problem.” She swung the door open. On the floor lay a pile of discarded, gooey spider string.
The guard was nowhere in sight.
CHAPTER 13:
BLOOD AND GUTS
_________________
“What happened?” I ran to the door.
“Shit!” Nemo yelled, spotting the empty strands of Night Weaver silk. I picked them up and inventoried them in my shadow bag. No use wasting good material.
Angie cocked an eyebrow. “Seems a bit obvious, don’t you think?”
Nemo stuck his finger out at me. “No! This dipshit said he tied him up and that he was secure. Said he was bound.”
I was quiet. He was right. I’d been the one to secure the guard, so he was my responsibility.
“Man, calm down,” Meatloaf said, joining us. “We couldn’t have anticipated what would happen. How could we? We can’t read their stats. We can’t see whatever shit they have armed but unequipped. We don’t even know their levels.”
“I’m sorry,” I muttered.
Fangs joined us too, shaking his head. “We’re all culpable here. It was an awful risk, but a necessary one.”
His words rang true and bolstered my confidence a bit, but it still felt shitty to know the guy had gotten away. There was no way he’d darted out into the dungeon either; he would have certainly ran back upstairs and alerted the rest of our jailors. Our only saving grace was the time freeze. So long as we were down here, we were safe from repercussions. We could spend a year in the dungeon and still emerge just a few seconds behind him. So we decided against trying to pursue.
Quest for Vengeance Page 15
