by G. D. Penman
[Savage Swine suffers 17 fire damage]
The hog squealed in pain and terror, still dancing back on its rear legs. With such an obvious opening, Martin rushed forward, sword held out in front of him.
The blade buried into the pig’s stomach, even as the hilt rammed Martin’s gut, knocking the wind out of him.
[Skaife suffers 3 bludgeoning damage]
[Savage Swine suffers 18 piercing damage]
Savage Swine has died.
Skaife gains 120 experience.
The pig collapsed, its great weight toppling forward, pinning Martin to the ground. There hadn’t even been enough time to find out the pig’s health before the whole thing was over.
Hot blood poured down Martin’s arm, soaking his fur and washing over his armor.
Martin had to wrestle and roll to get out from under the pig, but once he’d found his feet, he felt surprisingly good. In real life, even being near to violence had always left him shaking, but here, all he felt was proud.
With no sign of a bigger, angrier pig lurking nearby, he shuffled over to examine the mushrooms.
Unknown Plant [Requires Herbalism]
A strange gray fungus that reacts oddly to heat.
The lack of information was a bit annoying, but what he had seen of the combustible mushrooms was enough to make him pluck what he could find and send them off to his inventory for further study. He would really have to find some trainers – that weren’t completely obnoxious to the Murovan race – to help him dig into the mechanics of the crafting systems.
With that brief foray into botany over, he returned to the corpse and crouched down to examine the spoils of war.
Savage Swine
This feral pig escaped from the Crusade’s food stocks early in the campaign, fleeing to the nearby tunnels to make a new life for itself.
Loot: Tiny Tusks, Mystery Meat, Trotters
Requires Leatherworking to harvest: Light Leather Scraps
He had just started transferring the presumably useless items into his inventory when another tooltip suddenly popped into his line of sight. Martin let out another embarrassing squeak. He was really going to have to work out how to turn those off before he got into a proper fight.
You have been invited to join the Iron Riot guild by its founder,
Tesra Stormcrow.
He definitely hadn’t forgotten about Lindsay in the excitement of playing a new game. That would have been ridiculous. With another nod, he accepted the guild invitation.
Suddenly, he heard a whisper from behind his left ear.
“Nice of you to finally show up.”
He could practically hear Lindsay grinning.
Martin whipped around to look for her, but there was nothing behind him but echoing darkness and an undercooked portion of pulled pork.
“Uh, hello?” His voice echoed off down the tunnel.
“Still haven’t worked out how to talk back, eh? Maybe it is better like this. I’ve always said I could do with a lot less chatter from you.” Lindsay was practically cackling.
Martin concentrated on her character’s name. He repeated the words in his head. Tesra Stormcrow. Almost immediately, an abridged version of her character sheet appeared.
Tesra
Corvan Knave Level: 1 Sin: -5
He focused on that sheet and said, “Lindsay?”
There was a startled gasp, then:
“Did you just whisper to me directly? How do you do that? I’m just touching my guild crest when I want to talk to you.”
Martin glanced down and discovered that the bristling swords of the guild’s old logo were now embossed on the chest of his armor. He let Tesra’s sheet fall away and laid a hand on the icon.
“That is a lot easier. Where are you?”
“I’m just outside of Beachhead on a quest to kill some grubby little rat-men. What about you?”
Martin flinched at that but pressed on regardless. “Me too. Can we meet up?”
His map called for attention, like an itch that needed scratching, so he closed his eyes and pulled it up. There was a little black feather lying on an unexplored patch of the map a little further around the curve of the main cavern’s wall.
“Perfect. I’ll catch up to you in two minutes. Don’t go anywhere.”
Knowing what he did about her attention span, Martin ran. His stamina bar drained startlingly quickly, but at least his health had filled back up after all the time wandering around town.
As his stamina bottomed out, he actually started to feel tired. In real life he knew from his brief sprints to catch the train that he could push through tired and keep on moving, but here in Strata it seemed to be a real limitation. He slowed to a walk as the green bar refilled.
Tesra was perched on a ridge above the tunnel entrance when he arrived. He had only seen a few Corvan NPCs in town and they had all trended towards the old and portly. Tesra was anything but.
Her feathers were black and shiny, with a strangely lithe body beneath the dark leather of her armor. Her eyes sparkled lilac when she hopped down to greet him.
“Oh, no – it is one of the grubby little rat-men! What possessed you to pick that when you could have been a lizard? I thought you were all about those dragons?”
Martin couldn’t help but smile. Lindsay’s enthusiasm was as infectious as it was boundless. That reminded him of why he was here.
“Listen, Lindsay, I really appreciate you getting this game for me, but it’s just too much. You’ve got to return the NIH and get your money back.”
She cocked her head to one side.
“Rubbish. It’s my money. I’ll do what I want with it. What’s the point of spending all your time working if you can’t blow all your money on something fun?”
“Lindsay, it is far too much money for you to waste on me.”
He wondered if she could see him blushing through his fur. She pointed a pinfeather at him.
“That’s where you’re getting it twisted, though. Me buying you a headset and a game – that isn’t a waste, that’s an investment. Other games have got downloadable content so that folks can throw more money at them to make them easier. You’re my launch-day DLC. I spent a little bit of extra money that I didn’t really need anyway and got the best strategist money can buy.”
Flattery wasn’t completely lost on Martin, but he still had a few tricks up his sleeve.
“If you just return the NIH, I’ll buy one myself in a couple of months when I’ve saved up for it.”
“No can do, my fuzzy little friend. I need you now, not months from now when some other guild has already gotten the drop on us. This is a race to the finish, same as always, and you are my rocket-booster powerup.”
“You want to be the first one to finish Strata?” he asked her flatly.
“Wait.” She cocked her head the other way. “Do you seriously not know?”
“Know what?” Martin sighed.
She hopped a little closer.
“You really don’t know?”
That was enough.
“Will you just tell me what I don’t know!”
Lindsay was giggling but it came out in a weird cacophony of croaks through her beak.
“How am I meant to know what you don’t know?”
He took hold of her shoulders, feeling the hollow bones shifting in his grip. “Lindsay, will you stop dicking around and just tell me whatever it is?”
She shoved him off.
“All right, all right, all right. Uh, okay, you know Strata is a big dungeon, right? Well, they have it split up into different levels they call Deeps, so that we don’t get them mixed up with character levels. Anyway, there are a hundred deeps in the whole thing, with a boss every ten. Nobody has gotten below Deep Fifty yet.”
Martin scratched his chin. “But the game has been out for months.”
“Yeah, but it is hard as hell. Anyway, the reason everybody is in such a mad rush to be the first to the bottom is, first off, eternal bragging rig
hts.”
She began counting the reasons off on the five feathered fingers at the end of her wing. Martin nodded. “Of course.”
“The developers will add our characters to the game as NPCs.”
“Okay, very cool.”
“And you get every game they have ever made and will ever make from now on until the heat death of the universe for free.”
He shrugged. “Icing on the cake.”
It was her turn to grab him by the shoulders.
“I want to be the first one to the end, Martin. I want Iron Riot’s name to go down in gaming history. I want them to put us in history books. Like, really weirdly specific history books about MMOs.”
He tried to shrug again but her grip kept his shoulders pinned in place. “Who wouldn’t want that?”
She was practically vibrating with excitement. “So, you’re on board?”
He grinned. “You had me at ‘eternal bragging rights.’”
She bumped her forehead against his, just hard enough that the numbness started up and then died out again. It was what they had always done. The same gesture they’d been repeating over and over since they first started playing VRMMOs, but this time he actually felt it.
He couldn’t even remember the last time he had touched another person in real life, at least not deliberately. It was like she was right here with him. Like they were friends in real life instead of having the vast expanse of cyberspace stretched out between them. He could hardly believe it.
“Awesome, dude. Want to go kill some rats?”
“I mean, we’re first-level adventurers. I guess we’ve got to.”
She was croaking with amusement again.
“Iron Riot?”
They bumped heads again, more forcefully this time.
“Iron Riot.”
Six
The First Sin
Even with their skills and maps combined, it took the two of them an hour of aimless wandering through the tunnels of Deep One before they got even a hint of the Murovan deserters.
There was one more pig roaming the tunnels, browsing the variety of odd mushrooms on display. Martin stood back and let Lindsay brutalize it with her daggers while he prodded at the various mineral deposits that provided no more helpful information than [Requires Blacksmithing] when he peered at them.
There were definite signs of mining in some of these tunnels. Deliberate attempts had been made to shore up the ceilings and there were distinct patterns of scratching that he would have associated with pickaxes.
In a normal fantasy game, you had dwarves messing around in mines. Here in Strata, the vaguely anti-Semitic merchant-race traits of the dwarves seemed to have been foisted off onto Corvan characters, but making birds into miners didn’t seem like a good fit. The Wulvan would have been scraping their heads along every one of the wooden frames above their heads, eliminating them from the running too.
Martin’s bet was that the Crusade used the Murovan contingent as miners. After all, mining was dangerous, thankless work, and the Murovan intro text had described them as living in tunnels. It made perfect sense.
When he told Lindsay, she nodded along. “You think they’re down here?”
“They would know the terrain here better than anyone else, and if this was where they spent all their time, it might be where they felt safest?”
She tossed aside her torch, drew her daggers and stretched her arms out until the blades were touching both sides of the passage.
“So, if we’re getting close, I should probably start using stealth, scouting ahead, right?”
It was the right move, but Martin felt strange about letting her go on alone without him.
“First sign of trouble, you head back.”
She scoffed. “First sign of trouble, you charge in and find me.”
“Don’t I always?”
He sighed down the suddenly empty tunnel. Apparently, stealth worked on allies too. Good to know.
He crept forward along the tunnel with his hand resting on the hilt of his sword. The passage had dozens of side-branches, enough that you could probably get lost in the tangled warren of stone for days, but knowing Lindsay, she would have sprinted straight down the main one for as long as she could.
He paused for a moment. He didn’t need to rely on guesswork. The guild crest felt odd beneath his finger pads, like it was charged with static.
“Straight down the main tunnel?”
“Obviously,” she hissed back.
He grinned. “Any trouble?”
“Not yet, but the night is young.”
He picked up the pace a little. If she was actually in trouble, he was relatively confident that she would let him know, but it wouldn’t matter if he was too far away to do anything. That jogged his memory. He closed his eyes and pulled up a list of his exorcist abilities to find a healing spell.
Celestial Strike [10-second cooldown]
Healing Touch [60-second cooldown]
Rite of Retribution [60-minute cooldown]
He concentrated on the words Healing Touch but nothing happened. He had to swing his sword to get Celestial Strike working, so he gave the blade a few practice waves, to no avail.
Then he realized. It was so obvious he could kick himself. Exorcists couldn’t use shields, they didn’t dual wield and they didn’t use two-handed weapons. They needed a hand free. He thrust his empty paw forward and a golden glow surrounded it. Perfect. He touched it to his chest and felt warmth spreading through his body. A blink confirmed that whatever health he’d chipped off during his misadventures with the pig were now fully restored.
“You’d better hurry if you want to get this quest finished today,” Lindsay’s voice whispered in his ear.
“You’ve found them?”
“Yeah, but we’re late to the party.” Lindsay groaned. “You’d better run.”
Without another word, Martin sprinted down the corridor as fast as his little furry legs would carry him.
When he burst out of the tunnel into a wider cave, he skidded to a halt, overwhelmed yet again by his senses being overrun with too much information. The Murovan had built a little shanty town in the cave out of their mining supplies, even more ramshackle than Beachhead and quite a bit smaller. Everywhere Martin looked was covered in blood and clumps of fur.
“What—”
Lindsay burst out from between a pair of shacks with her daggers in hand, chasing after an unarmed Murovan girl who was squealing for mercy. Without thinking, he stepped in between them and Lindsay skidded to a halt. “What do you think you’re doing? We need ten of them between us and half of ruddy Beachhead got here before us.”
He moved back into Lindsay’s path as she tried to duck around him.
“Something isn’t right.”
“Oh, don’t be a bleeding heart,” she groaned. “Just because they’re rats and you’re a rat doesn’t mean anything. They’re NPCs! They aren’t people. How many elves do you think I killed back in Dracolich?”
“You aren’t listening to me. Something isn’t right. If the designers wanted us to kill these things, why would they make them scared and defenseless? Why would they try and make us feel sympathy for them?”
His brain felt like it was whirring, trying to decipher this new puzzle.
“It has to be some sort of morality system? They are testing us to see if we’ll just follow orders, or if we’ll do what is right in spite of the orders. ‘Can you kill ten rats?’ isn’t any sort of question at all. Should you kill them? That is a real question.”
Lindsay stopped trying to chase the rat girl as she scampered out of sight.
“So, what, you think we just go back and say we aren’t doing it?”
“They made them look like scared kids. What kind of psychopath could kill scared kids?”
As if on cue, a Wulvan in full chainmail burst out of one of the shacks, blood crusted in every crevice.
Dmitri Blackpaw Level 2 Wulvan Knight
The axe in his ha
nds was dripping with gore.
“That one’s mine,” the Wulvan called. “I’ve only got one to go.”
Martin rolled his eyes. “I’m with you. I’m a player.”
Dmitri’s pace didn’t slow, even as Lindsay called out, “He’s with us. He isn’t a monster.”
“Looks like a little rat bastard to me.” He hefted the axe in his hands. “Tell you what: if it doesn’t count towards my ten, I’ll send him an apology.”
The knight leapt and Martin only just got his sword up in time to deflect the razor edge of the descending axe.
[Skaife BLOCKS 18 damage]
[Skaife suffers 18 stamina loss]
The time for talk was done. The black-furred knight spun, putting more force into the next sweeping blow, knocking Martin’s feeble guard wide open.
[Skaife BLOCKS 12 damage]
[Skaife suffers 12 stamina loss]
Martin backed away. The next swing missed him by a hair’s breadth and forced his heel into the slippery innards of a dead Murovan. With a yelp, he fell on his back.
A sweep of the axe brushed past the tips of his pointed ears as he went down.
Lindsay rushed at the Wulvan, daggers ready and any doubts forgotten, but the towering mass of fur and iron just batted her aside with the flat of his axe.
[Tesra suffers 16 bludgeoning damage]
She smashed right through the paper-thin wall of the nearest hovel before falling out of sight.
[Tesra suffers 4 bludgeoning environmental damage]
Martin barely had time to stand before the Wulvan’s fury came raining back down on him. He scrambled back, deflecting each blow as it fell. His stamina dwindled with each parry. Each strike got closer and closer to finding its mark. Martin’s stomach turned when he realized the knight was laughing.
The frantic crab-walk forced him further and further from the paltry torchlight of the settlement, back into a dark alleyway between two pathetic heaps of splinters that some poor Murovan must have called home.
