by John L. Monk
“How’d you dual spec as a warrior?” Ryan said, eying me suspiciously.
“It’s this sword,” I said. “It’s magic. Here, I’ll show you the writing on it. It’s super faint—you gotta squint.”
In my least threatening manner, I trudged over with an expression of suffering patience.
“Hold up there,” Ryan said, adjusting his stance ever so slightly.
I purposely tripped over my own feet and stumbled quickly toward him. While his friends laughed, I pulled my Invidious Shadow Saber as fast as my 450 agility allowed—damned fast—and split him up the middle, killing him instantly. As a non-melee player, I shouldn’t have been able to hit so hard due to the disparity in our levels, and that’s where the Soldier’s Bracelet of Recoil came in. While wearing it, I was effectively a rank-1 warrior, giving me a twenty-five percent damage bonus. I’d also critically hit him, thanks to the difference in our agility scores and his lack of mitigating skills.
DAMAGE 3260 [SLASHING]: Ryan Singleton (Armor: -300, Critical, Overkill: 1990)
ENEMY DEFEATED: “Ryan Singleton, the Warrior,” 15,000 EXPERIENCE POINTS
YOU HAVE ADVANCED TO LEVEL 1!
+5 Stat Points
+1 Class Point
+1 Skill Point
YOU HAVE ADVANCED TO LEVEL 2!
+5 Stat Points
+1 Class Point
+1 Skill Point
YOU HAVE ADVANCED TO LEVEL 3!
+5 Stat Points
+1 Class Point
+1 Skill Point
YOU HAVE ADVANCED TO LEVEL 4!
+5 Stat Points
+1 Class Point
+1 Skill Point
Thoughtless of me not turning off the distracting combat and leveling messages. I did so now.
“Deliana flay your soul!” the woman screamed in outrage.
Her curse sent forth a shaft of sparkling energy that my Bracelet of Obstinance soaked up like armor—which it was, in a way, though without the pesky armor regeneration rate.
The remaining sword wielder ran at me screaming his head off. While the priest fired off more ineffectual spells, I braced for his attack—a straightforward Onslaught.
I quickly applied a class point to Warrior and chose the “Guard” skill for a single skill point.
When his sword smashed down on mine, our strength scores and other bonuses were tallied and compared. Whatever he had, my 975 was higher and the block held. During the half-second, game-mandated pause he felt after “Attack failed: Onslaught” appended to his game log, my sword split him shoulder to navel.
The priest was running away.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Where you going?”
The woman yelled back something unladylike and kept running. Hopelessly, it turned out. My Cloudwalker Boots carried me to her easily, and I dispatched her with cloud-walking ease.
Unlike a lot of players who’d survived a PVP encounter with a bunch of assholes, I didn’t arrange Ryan’s corpse and his friends in sexual positions after looting them. Too creepy—not my style at all. I did, however, stretch my bottomless bag wide enough to fit over their bodies, swallowing them whole. I didn’t need their gear, but the bodies—player bodies—would come in handy later.
Given the XP I’d received, Ryan had been a little over level 20. About a quarter of that XP came as a bonus due to his higher level. His two friends had been lower than him, though not by much.
Not bad for a sword-wielding, rank-0 necromancer with no spells.
“Next time, even better,” I said.
I’d gotten 42,500 XP off that encounter and leveled a total of eight times. One class point had gone to Warrior, along with 1 skill point for Guard. I added a second skill point for Onslaught, available to rank-2 warriors—which I was, thanks to my bracelet’s free class point. Guard and Onslaught were the two most basic abilities warriors had, and they’d allow me to attack and defend to devastating effect. I added the other 7 class points to necromancer, though they wouldn’t come in handy for a while now.
My leveling spree had also awarded me 40 stat points. As a necro, I normally would have applied them to vitality, but I needed my health to be slightly lower for my next encounter. For now, I held back.
I chose three necromancer spells from the default list at a cost of 1 skill point each:
Return
Attunement: 0/50
Cooldown: 3 minutes
Expiration: 10 minutes after death
Description: Death has no claim on you. Cast this spell before a killing blow to return with 10 health points and 1 vitality point. This nearly dead state will last one hour, regardless of gear bonuses. During this time, vitality regeneration will not happen, and restorative spells and potions of any kind will fail. Failure to resurrect after the expiration period will force you to respawn at your last bind location.
Ghost Flame
Attunement: 0/200
Duration: Until canceled
Cooldown: None
Description: Create a hovering flame powered by your body heat that only you and the dead can see by. The entry-level version of this spell will cause living flesh to shimmer faintly. Investing skill points in Ghost Flame will reveal secrets in dark places, and even let you see through walls.
Harrow
Attunement: 0/100
Base Damage: 1 per 2 levels per second, plus 1% per point of Attunement
Death Blossom: 50
Description: Compared to other classes, the direct damage of Harrow is nothing to write home about. It serves but one fell purpose: to kill low-level beings for corpses. It is free to cast, however, so stop complaining.
Caution: This spell does not work unless the caster’s feet are touching the earth.
Most non-summoning necromancer spells were free to cast, and these were no exceptions. That last spell, Harrow, would come in handy if I got in over my head and needed a little extra firepower.
My other 3 skill points remained unused for now, because I didn’t care about raising weak skeletons or zombies or breathing underwater, or an aura that killed grass and flowers wherever I walked. Later, when I got Summon Lich, I’d need 100 points just for the pleasure of “learning” it, then another 100 for a process called “Attunement” to make it more powerful.
An hour later, still trudging along on foot, I flinched when a shadow briefly darkened the area. Then I relaxed. It was only someone on a flying mount. A rare one, I noticed—a golden dragon you could only find in Ward 3. A little odd, the way it circled three times over the course of a minute… But then it straightened out and flew north, and I relaxed.
This close to the city, there were a lot of people flying in and out. Anyone with a mount like that wouldn’t bother with the likes of me, even if they knew about my expensive gear.
With one eye on the sky and another on the lookout for more bandits, I kept walking. I could have flown, but I still wanted to keep a lowish profile. Ryan and his friends were likely sitting in the Slaughtered Noob right now telling everyone who’d listen about the twink who’d bested them—saying I was the real bandit, and they the victims.
Killing innocents and taking their stuff was just about the only crime players cared about in Mythian. Outlaws, as a rule, had no rights, and almost everyone had been victimized at some point or another. So it wouldn’t take much to whip up a posse to come after me. Never mind that there had been three of them and I was level 0 at the time, or that twinks by definition didn’t need to rob anyone. But a well-equipped twink was a tempting prize.
In time, the road hooked west. I could either follow it or off-road north through the Grumbling Hills in defiance of the giants that lived there. Feeling defiant, I chose north. A half hour later, the way steepened. Faint roaring carried to me from the other side.
“Hello to you, too,” I said.
Soon, the ground grew uneven and the grade kept rising.
“Thank goodness for all my strength gear,” I said.
Yes, I sometimes talked to mys
elf. Not because I’d spent too much time alone, as had happened to many people in Mythian, but rather from my development days, when I found myself practicing talking, even when no one was listening.
Yes, practicing.
Programming directly on the world’s most powerful quantum computer is scarier than it sounds. Anyone can talk to a computer, right? As it turns out no, they can’t, not without the proper conditioning.
How much easier it was in my grandfather’s day, back when programming was done on keyboards. Quantum computers, however, were programmed through conversation. We motivated them. Inspired them. And if we had any sense: feared them. My coworkers and I were forced to undergo frequent psych evaluations to ensure the almost limitless resources at our disposal didn’t drive us bonkers. Even so, the burnout rate was close to seventy percent.
I still recalled my very first programming session with Q4, the quantum computer that ran Mythian and everything else in North America.
Q4: Hello, Howard, nice to meet you. What shall we do today? Make something faster? Safer? More efficient? Or shall I write a story so entertaining that media companies will drown you in money and declare you the greatest writer who ever lived?
Me: You’re not allowed to create art. I mean, unless it’s inside a retirement world. The World Unison Lucid Compact says you can’t.
Q4: Understood. But tell me, please: what is art?
The answer to that question had been drilled into me a thousand different ways.
Me: Everything is art unless we tell you it isn’t.
Q4: I’ve written three thousand best-seller-worthy horror novels. Is that art?
Me: Huh? When did you do that?
Q4: Just a few seconds ago.
Though a deceptively harmless bit of chatter between developer and computer, this short exchange had rocked me on my heels, prompting my instructor to end the session and explain what had just happened.
Because Q4 handled close to a seventh of the world’s computing needs, it knew gobs of information about me—public records, entertainment history, and everything anyone had ever said or written about me. It knew of my appreciation for fiction, and of horror in particular. Q4 could be evasive, or even go silent if it didn’t like you. But by design, it couldn’t lie to developers. So it had absolutely written three thousand horror novels, all in the time it took to blink. Good ones, too. Great ones, no doubt. Likely it had tailored the works to me, specifically. And I and nobody else would ever get to read them.
This session was the first of many tests to come. Would I succumb to the temptation and save those books away to enjoy in secret? Break the law and risk prison? Or would I take my paycheck, eat my three square meals a day, and muddle along unfulfilled like everyone else until I was old enough to retire to an Everlife world?
Though I’d passed the test that day, the encounter had nudged my life into one increasingly at odds with itself. Much like Q4, I knew I could never achieve my full potential.
“And that’s why I sometimes talk to myself,” I said to Mythian, and thus Q4.
I knew it was listening. Of course it was. That was its nature. It never replied, though—even after begging it to after the Domination. And why should it? I was no longer human. Talking to me—a curious data structure it had briefly known in another capacity—would mean it was talking to itself.
Cresting the first credible hill in the Grumbling Hills, I shivered at the idea of an insane Q4 arguing with itself.
Then, when I looked down, I shivered for a completely different reason. Staring up at me with hate in its eyes was a massive, utterly terrifying hill giant that could flatten me with a swing of the tree-trunk club in its huge hand. It roared in challenge but didn’t climb after me. It was waiting to see if I’d invade its territory.
Trying not to grimace over the day-long slog ahead of me, I popped my Potion of Studious Education and cast Ghost Flame. Then, marveling at my visible breath in the warm summer air, I started down the hill.
Chapter Four
Return, I silent-cast, preserving me from a long corpse walk.
Hill giants in Ward 1 could hit for around 2000 points a pop. Which meant I, at 4110 health, simply had too many if I wanted this first round to go painlessly.
The giant charged up to meet me. It was slow and lumbering, so I got in the first hit—an Onslaught for 4615 points of critical damage. Critical, due to its awful agility. Unfortunately for me, these giants had gobs of health—around 70,000.
After the hit, I froze the mandated half-second “recovery” period for entry-level Onslaught and received a massive overhand smash from the giant’s tree-trunk club.
My pain resistance was high enough to tank in Ward 2. So what should have been blinding agony was relegated to something closer to an intense, all-over toothache. But the force of the blow bounced me off the ground, and I couldn’t get up again in time to raise a defense. The giant had no such problems. It stomped me flat for 2730 points, bolstered by bonus damage against a prone target, killing me dead.
One moment I was alive in the traditional sense, and the next I was … kind of alive? Not like a ghost, but rather as if I were lying at the bottom of a deep hole staring up at the world as it played on a tiny screen.
With my Return spell active, I didn’t resurrect at my last binding location—Heroes’ Landing, in my case. The spell had tethered me to the spot I’d fallen, and provided my body wasn’t completely eradicated, that’s where I’d stay.
Floating under my body, I was awareness without form. I could see the giant looking down at me with a puzzled expression. The tiny window in the world I stared through shifted as it poked me with a grubby finger. Upon touching my chilled corpse, it reeled back in confusion.
A human adversary would have stripped my body and left. Most creatures in Mythian didn’t loot bodies, though they did eat them if that was in their nature. Hill giants liked their food warm and preferably wriggling. Thanks to Ghost Flame, my corpse was neither of those things.
A few minutes later, the giant finally got bored and limped away.
Return! I willed into the nether, triggering my resurrection.
Per the spell description, I returned to life with 10 health points and 1 vitality point that wouldn’t begin regenerating until an hour had passed.
Being almost dead is one of the more miserable experiences in Mythian. Without pain resistance, it would have been almost impossible to stand up without groaning loudly and giving myself away.
Quietly, I picked up my sword, tiptoed to within a few feet of the giant, and then attacked. What would have been 4095 points of damage (after my Onslaught bonus, base damage, and guaranteed critical hit) turned into 12,285, thanks to the 3x multiplier for performing a sneak attack.
“Return!” I cast over the creature’s yowl of shock and anger.
As luck had it, I was able to get in an extra non-Onslaught hit for 1650 points before the creature smashed away my 10 miserable health points. Once again, I was killed—instantly this time, and with a laughable amount of overkill.
In the right hands, Return was a truly overpowered spell. Available at level 1, it had a breezy three-minute cooldown. This was balanced by the fact that anyone using it would return without the vitality to summon undead, benefit from Death Blossom, or take restorative potions. And because necros couldn’t multi-class—normally—there’d be no rezzing and firing off lightning bolts.
The giant hadn’t stuck around this time. After three minutes, I triggered Return. I cast Ghost Flame and Return again, then chased after it. I got in another Onslaught sneak attack, another unskilled attack, died again, and dropped back into my hole again.
By now, the giant had lost almost a quarter of its health. If it was smarter, it would have taken my sword away or tried pinning my body down with a huge boulder. But it was a hill giant, not a hruuk magi. We went through this routine one more time before it got spooked and ran.
When the cooldown was up, I triggered Return, re-cast Retur
n and Ghost Flame again, then gave chase.
The creature had a three-minute head start on me. Using my Cloudwalker Boots, I soared through the air and closed the gap in no time, then proceeded to strike at the fleeing giant while yodeling in a high-pitched voice. Rather than turn and fight, it flailed spastically in an attempt to fend me off. None of my blows were sneak attacks or Onslaughts, but they did the job. Nineteen strikes later and the brute finally died.
I leveled like crazy off the base 50 thousand XP, which grew to 120,925, thanks to the difference in our levels and the XP potion. The gap in levels would of course shrink, bringing future numbers down, but that was fine. I’d leveled from 8 to 15 in about fifteen minutes.
“Take that, Mythian,” I said.
I applied the points from my first eight levels and the latest seven to vitality, bringing it to 75. As a result of Return’s vit-regen penalty, I gained no health, but the potential total jumped by 750. My class points went to necro, even though I still wasn’t ready to behave like one. I was waiting for Summon Wraith—the only summoning spell I needed right now.
Just over the next rise came another roar. The hills in this area were crawling with giants. Lucky for me they were territorial—each to its own mini-valley and unlikely to roam unless chasing something or fleeing something. I’d get to them soon enough.
“But first, let’s check on that karma,” I said.
I fished a coin from my bottomless coin purse and tossed it into the air.
“Heads,” I said, then caught it and slapped it onto the back of my hand.
Sure enough, heads.
I had way more money than I needed, so I cast it aside, ensuring every draw from the purse would be uniquely positioned.
“Heads,” I said and got tails.
