Dungeons of Strata (Deepest Dungeon #1) - A LitRPG series

by G. D. Penman

  It was resolved now. He would just have to keep his head in the game in the future. With a shrug he started splashing back along into the first tunnel and pressing ever onwards towards the dark fuzzy patch on his map, hoping all the while that he wouldn’t bump into Snekboi or any of the other morons that seemed to populate the playerbase on his way past the trap at the entrance.

  Luck was not on his side. Snekboi was back in the tunnel up ahead, prodding at the quicksand with his tail, and a looming black-furred Wulvan was with him. Dmitri. Martin groaned. What were the odds that the two players he had killed so far in this game would just happen to get together?

  Either he was interrupting the Iron Riot survivors support group, or this was a vengeful ambush. He didn’t feel good about either option. It didn’t take long to do the math here. Two of them, one of him, and both of them a level above him.

  He couldn’t even rely on the tunnel as a chokepoint; it was easily wide enough for two people to fight side by side. They had every advantage. Still, Martin strode forward without ever letting them see him flinch.

  Snekboi spotted him and reached for his daggers. Dmitri rolled his shoulders and stepped forward to meet him head-on.

  “I want to talk to you!”

  “Then talk,” Martin quipped. They still weren’t moving. Snekboi should have dropped into stealth and tried to circle him, but he was too lost in his own drama.

  “You know what they call player killers in this game? Sinners.” Dmitri growled, patting an empty palm with the haftof his axe. It was still the starter weapon.

  “You’re a sinner,” he went on. “And we’re here to spank you for it.”

  Keep poking at them. Keep them too angry to think.

  “Sorry, I’m not into that kind of role-play. But I’m glad you’ve found a little friend who is.”

  “Oi,” Snekboi bellowed, but Dmitri just ignored the noise with another display of the callous disregard that had made Martin fight him to begin with.

  Dmitri hefted his axe and growled again. “You’re going down.”

  “All the way down, eventually,” Martin said. “But right now, I’m going that way.”

  Martin lifted up his hand to point past Dmitri. Then cast Rebuke.

  The knight was clad in full plate armor that probably would have turned Martin’s sword away like it was made of rubber, but it was heavy, and thanks to the Wulvan build, it was particularly top-heavy.

  Dmitri didn’t just move backwards; he flipped right over, landing face down in the quicksand that had claimed his little friend earlier. He squirmed and roared uselessly into the thick mud.

  [Dmitri Blackpool suffers 1 water environmental damage]

  Martin kept on walking, right over the fallen idiot. How did these people expect to get through the dungeon with no awareness of their surroundings?

  Snekboi was still standing to one side, his mouth hanging open in dismay. Martin looked him up and down and scoffed.

  “Don’t try something like this again. You won’t get lucky twice. The only reason you’re alive is that you aren’t worth my time.”

  It was a calculated risk, walking away. There was a chance that Snekboi would come after him and stab him in the back before he rounded the next corner, but Martin didn’t think he was that competent, or that focused.

  Just as likely, Snekboi would remember this display of foolish bravado as a sign that Martin was beyond reach, and he’d never have to deal with him again.

  From the lack of a death notification and his unchanged Sin score, he assumed that Snekboi’s attentions had been diverted to saving his friend. The only good thing about the two idiots sticking together was that they’d slow each other down even more. Once Martin was a few deeps down, he’d never see them again.

  Heading in the other direction from the entrance to the deep, the tunnel got muddier and more overgrown, but the water was shallower as a result and he was able to walk without checking whether every footstep was going to be lethal.

  Without that danger to focus on, and with a growing certainty that Snekboi wouldn’t be coming after him any time soon, his mind began to wander.

  He summoned the Rain Tear Crystal out of his backpack and toyed with it as he walked along. It seemed to exude water with the slightest touch of pressure, like ice at room temperature. Maybe these gems were the source of all the moisture down here?

  Magic was always a useful handwave solution to worldbuilding problems, but Martin had thought better of the people who had made Strata – at least until he’d met them. They’d put so much effort into realistic physics, and the NPCs paid lip-service to ideas of ecosystems; why wouldn’t they take the extra step and have the environments make sense?

  The sound of splashing up ahead drew Martin out of his reverie and he let the gem vanish back into his bag without a second thought. Splashing meant movement. Movement meant something alive.

  His hand drifted down to his sword, but he didn’t draw it just yet, not when the noise might be another player who didn’t share Lindsay’s fixation on always going right.

  One case of mistaken identity had been enough for one lifetime. He didn’t need to encourage random players to attack him by charging at them with his weapon drawn.

  The tunnel opened out abruptly into a vast mud-roofed cavern, all traces of the stonework that had defined the other half of the deep lost beneath the overgrowth of vines, mosses and fungi

  The only constant from the rest of Martin’s explorations seemed to be the water pooling on the floor, but while it had been in constant motion elsewhere – even in the stone cisterns – here it was stagnant and reeking of decay.

  As before, Martin waded out into the murky water cautiously, but unlike before, his caution was well-founded. He was up to his waist after only a few steps and the next one was likely to put him up to his neck.

  He shuddered as something squishy wriggled out from under his feet. This place was definitely inhabited, but it remained to be seen whether all the local wildlife was hostile.

  [ANNOUNCEMENT: The Brotherhood in Exile have defeated Carnifex, Tenth Archduke of Strata]

  Martin blinked the message away. Every time he started to enjoy the solitude in Strata, another reminder that he wasn’t alone in this world seemed to intrude. It wasn’t that he didn’t like playing with other people – the experience of being on a properly organized raid team was a special kind of bliss – it was just that the majority of the other people he encountered in games seemed to be intellectually stunted frat-boys in wolf’s clothing.

  Lily pads and pond scum drifted ever closer to his face as he pushed his way forward through the uncomfortably thick water. He was making more noise than he would have liked, but that only served to reinforce the idea that whoever or whatever he had heard in here couldn’t have gotten far.

  Once the water was tickling his chin, Martin realized it wasn’t getting any deeper. He wouldn’t have to swim, but he would still be almost entirely useless in these deep expanses at the center of the cavern. Even turning around to make his escape seemed to take forever with the murky water dragging at him.

  When he came back with the rest of the guild tomorrow, he was going to have to come up with some sort of solution to this. Maybe they could pool their gold and buy something like a canoe back in Beachhead, or steal one of the raggedy gates and use it as a raft.

  Halfway back to the entrance, there was another splash. He spun around, looking for the source and sending a low wave out in a spiral all around him.

  “Who’s there?”

  There was no reply; just the gentle bobbing of the detritus and vegetation on the surface of the water. Despite the lack of any evidence, Martin was sure that somebody was watching him. The few patches of fur on his body that weren’t sodden were trying to stand up on end.

  He drew his sword and held it up out of the water. Celestial Strike lit up the blade, setting the dull green-tinged water shimmering and reflecting the haunting bright spots of eyeshine from just a
little further out.

  He didn’t run; he didn’t panic; he just kept on moving slowly backwards towards the entrance. He could count more than a dozen eyes out there, just barely breaking the surface of the water, the bodies they were attached to concealed by natural camouflage or a layer of pond scum thick enough to trick his vision.

  The spacing was just about right for alligators, and there was a definite reptilian flavor to those big round eyes and their yellow glow.

  They blinked at him in unison. He gave up on trying to walk over the mud-slick floor and started paddling for safety as fast as his stubby legs and one free arm would carry him. The splashing behind him started up again and his own noisy attempts at movement swiftly drowned it out as he grew more and more frantic.

  He crashed headlong into some thick hidden root and the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding was forced out of him in a yelp.

  The hidden structure was thick enough that it might support his weight, and now that he’d been stopped, the splashes approaching from behind were unbearably close.

  He hauled himself up onto the woven bridge of roots that he now realized he’d crashed into, ready to make a last stand against whatever fresh nightmare was bubbling up behind him.

  Weapon blazing with light and eyes bulging out of his head, Martin turned to face his pursuers and froze.

  The monsters he had been expecting were nowhere to be seen. There were creatures arrayed in a semicircle, but they were far from the mass of scales and teeth he’d been expecting. The closest one had its massive eyes locked on his sword, and it was cowering back slightly from the light.

  They were humanoid, in the same sense that Murovan or Corvan were humanoid. They had the same basic torso, but that was when the amphibian traits came in. Those huge yellow eyes swiveled on the sides of a distinctly frog-like face, and from what Martin could see of the webbed hands and patterned, slimy skin, that resemblance continued throughout the creature.

  The light flickered and died. He had spent too long without using his Celestial Strike. Even when darkness swept back over the water, the frog-things didn’t come rushing forward. They were staring at him. Almost…expectantly?

  “Hello there… uh… frog people?”

  More heads popped up out of the water like jack-in-the-boxes. The coloration of each different frog-man seemed to be a unique pattern, so Martin was just about able to tell them apart.

  In a predictably croaky voice, one of them spoke.

  “You make hurt?”

  “No. No.” Martin let out a sigh of relief. “I come in peace.”

  The speckled spokesman cringed and some of the closer frogmen dove back under the surface.

  “You make us pieces?”

  “What? No! Sorry, no. I am not going to…” Martin paused, sheathed his sword, and recalculated. “Me no hurt?”

  Speckles came forward.

  “You welcome, dry-friend. We Anurvan. What you?”

  Martin did not feel particularly dry at the moment, but on the sliding scale of comparison he supposed that he lacked the slime coating of a frog, and that made him drier than them.

  “I’m hu… uh… Murovan.”

  “We welcome Hu’Uh’Murovan. We be good friends.” Speckles and a few of the smaller, braver Anurvan paddled closer, with a couple of them popping up out of the water onto the walkway. “How make sword shiny?”

  “Oh, I, uh, I’m an exorcist. That’s just something we can do.”

  “You teach?”

  They crept closer and closer along the walkway, more details becoming apparent as the pond scum slithered off. They were skinnier than Martin would have expected, their bones clearly visible where the skin was stretched thin. Their state of near starvation was apparent because they didn’t have much in the way of clothes; mostly just little patches of rank-smelling fish-scales and some bones strapped on as decoration.

  Their weapons were similarly lackluster; little axes and a few spears here and there, topped with barely sharpened bone. These were not the apex predators of the dungeon. They were the bottom-feeders.

  Martin blinked, backtracked to the last thing said and quickly answered Speckles.

  “I wouldn’t know how. Sorry.”

  The Anurvan seemed to weigh Martin’s words every time he spoke, as if he was imparting some great wisdom. When Speckles was close enough to touch, he croaked softly.

  “Others come, they hurt us. Send us down to dark water. I think you like them, but you not like them too?”

  Martin could only imagine what the arrival of a regular group of players would look like to these frail creatures. These little frog-men didn’t even have a few layers of fearsome monsters between them and the first wave of bloodthirsty crusaders.

  It would be a genocide. An endlessly repeating genocide, as the dungeon brought them back. If the ecosystem of the dungeon worked the way he suspected it did, with weaker monsters respawning along with all the rest and being driven up through the layers by the horrors of the lower deeps, he was amazed they hadn’t ambushed him while he was still in the water when they had the chance.

  He couldn’t even conceive of living through all that and still being trusting enough to answer when somebody shouted hello on your doorstep.

  Martin shuddered.

  “No. I’m not like them. I don’t kill for fun. Just when it is necessary. Like you and your fish.”

  All of the Anurvan nodded solemnly at that. Maybe the bobbing heads were just some sort of acknowledgement that another person was speaking, but they seemed to understand him clearly enough.

  “You come with us?”

  Martin found himself nodding back, until they were all bobbing their heads up and down. Speckles reached out a three-fingered hand.

  Despite everything Martin knew about contact poisons and toad secretions, he decided to trust the Anurvan. He clasped Speckles’ hand, and then they were off.

  Without a guide, Martin would never have been able to make his way across the hidden tracks beneath the water’s surface, but trailing so close behind his amphibian assistant, he didn’t even have a chance to misstep and fall into the murk.

  His low-light vision had helped him a lot, but he soon realized that here it served only to confuse him. He could see what looked like a solid surface under the waters, but that was just the depth that his limited vision could make out. Anything could be beyond it.

  He had no idea just how deep the water had become as they moved out towards the center of the cavern. All he knew was that in some places, even the Anurvan chose to hop up out of the water rather than risk swimming over the top.

  “Why you no hurt?” Speckles was close enough that he could be heard over the soft splashing of their movement without the other frog-folk listening in. “All from above hurt. Kill. Take. What you come for if not hurt?”

  Martin had to think about his answer. Then, when he remembered that this was all just a game, he had to think it through all over again while also worrying about the fact he’d forgotten that this was just a game.

  His first, gut instinct was that it was wrong. That the Anurvan were people, just the same as anyone else. But they weren’t. This was a video game, and these were just characters in a story – characters so minor that they didn’t even warrant names.

  By all rights he should have slaughtered them all, taken anything of value and moved on. They were just walking chunks of experience. Probably not much experience, but all together they’d probably be enough to replenish all that the Master had stolen from him.

  Yet he’d been talking to them as if they were people, and they’d honestly behaved more like people than most of the other players he’d met so far. He had learned to trust his gut, but years in a guild had taught him how to justify his intuition too.

  “I told you before. I’m an exorcist. We’re meant to hunt down evil things. I’ve met some of those evil things since I came to Strata, and I’m pretty sure I can recognize them when I see them. You guys aren’t evil. Yo
u’re just unlucky enough to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Speckles blinked its transparent eyelids.

  “Less… words?”

  Martin tried to parse it down to the bare minimum.

  “I hurt bad things. You not bad.”

  Speckles bobbed its head, seemingly satisfied with his answer yet again. Who knew peace was so easy?

  Peering ahead, Martin could make out the shape of what might have been a village on stilts, hanging above the surface of the swamp, but the shape was bizarre, like the cone-roofed structures had poured down from the ceiling rather than being built.

  As they got closer, he realized that each little hut was made from a single root, teased down out of the ceiling and trained to coil into the required shape over years. The wood was still alive. With a start, Martin realized that the hidden walkways beneath them had been grown out in the same way.

  As they got closer to the village, the walkways spread out and split, with different Anurvan scattering across the complex web of paths, following them by memory back to the different huts and halls dotted around the periphery of the central mass of roots.

  It was like a mirror of Beachhead above it: a thriving little town balanced on the surface of unknowable depths.

  Despite the size of the place, Martin couldn’t see many Anurvan about. The little scouting party that had picked him up had contained almost as many frog-folk as he could spot arrayed around the fishing holes and darting between huts. This place was a piece of art, generations in the making, and it should have been thriving. Instead, it was a ghost town.

  Here and there, he could make out hints at why. A charred root dangling dead from the roof where a building had once been. Glimpses of green wood where axes or swords had scarred the roots. One whole walkway was twisted up out of the water, struck by some massive force powerful enough to overpower the decades it had spent growing into its current form.

  That last one didn’t seem likely to be the work of the crusaders. The Anurvan were stuck between the hammer and the anvil, powerful monsters preying on them from below and invading crusaders crashing down from above.