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

by G. D. Penman

  He might not have found the developers yet, but the repetitive actions of the patent hunt had at least given him the clarity of mind to understand why he was chasing after them so hard. It was because he liked to have all of the information available to inform his decisions, even the things that other people would overlook.

  When they had just started to play Dracolich, the heavy metal steampunk aesthetic had distracted him from the naming scheme. It had taken him until he was level 50 to realize that underneath the armor plating and cogs, the whole setting was based on Norse mythology. That in itself hadn’t helped to inform his decisions all that much since so much of fantasy was rooted in the Norse stuff, but once he’d researched the writers and realized that they were from Scandinavia, he had started to understand that he wasn’t dealing with the pop-culture Norse mythology, he was dealing with the real stuff.

  He’d read through all of the textbooks he could stand, memorized every myth and legend that had been passed down through the ages, and when they finally got to the Anguish Keep raid it had all paid off.

  In the game’s lore, the Svartclankers had been torturing the last surviving Baldragon there for decades. The Baldragon had been cursed with immortality, so no matter what they did to it, it couldn’t die.

  In mechanical terms, the raid had to keep fighting off waves of Clanker Torture Engines or the Baldragon would explode, killing them all.

  Only Martin had known that the Mistletoe Poison they’d recovered from the Forest of Flickering Flames the month before was meant to end the dragon’s suffering before it nuked the whole raid, and it was only once that little titbit had been leaked to the other guilds after they’d poached one of his healers that anyone else managed to clear the dungeon.

  Martin didn’t play games to beat other players; he played them to beat the creators, and knowing who they were was part and parcel of that.

  Martin couldn’t help but feel like this was another piece of the puzzle. That something about the studio that created Strata was going to be the clue that would help him to beat the game and win this latest victory for the guild. If he could just find them…

  The next time he looked up, it was because somebody had nudged his elbow as they got off the train, just hard enough that the screen moved out of his field of vision. He was really going to have to stop phasing out like that. It was going to get him into trouble.

  The phone was hot when he tucked it into his pocket, the battery down to its last dregs. It wasn’t usually used this much. Hell, Martin didn’t think it had ever been used this much.

  At his station, he made a detour to the mini-mart to stock up on supplies for the weekend. He had absolutely no intention of leaving his apartment again until he left for work on Monday. As Lindsay was fond of saying: “Outside is for losers.”

  Some sort of jerky formed the protein backbone of his evening meal as he headed for home. Peppery and leathery in equal measure, he barely even tasted it. His phone was back in front of his face and the patents were starting to thin.

  He had been tweaking his search terms as he went, adding more and more filters until all of the medicines and frankly terrifying skull drills vanished. It wasn’t until he was on the stairs up to his apartment and a red warning was blinking 2% charge that he found what he was looking for.

  Four years back, someone named Edwin Klimpt had patented a theoretical device that could be used to induce hallucinations and read brainwave feedback.

  Four years wasn’t a ridiculously short development cycle for a game, even for something as colossal as an MMO. Martin wet his lips, savoring the lack of fur for now.

  “Edwin Klimpt, who the hell are you?”

  Sixteen

  The Aquatic Engines

  Martin managed to get logged in ahead of Lindsay for a change, taking the long, painful dive into Beachhead in his stride.

  He could have run ahead and tried to discover the boss of Deep Two before everyone arrived, but instead he detoured to the loathsome marketplace.

  The calls of the vendors were loud enough to drown out the slurs being slung his way, and he managed to sell the Rain Tear Crystal for considerably less than he thought it was worth to a Corvan who looked down her beak at him the whole time they were speaking.

  700 silver and change was all that he had acquired so far and normally he wouldn’t even think of squandering it on new equipment at this stage, but if the Masters were set on denying him item drops, he would need to take whatever edge he could get.

  He discounted new, heavier armor immediately. Fighting in the swamp was hard enough with what he already had weighing him down. There were no players selling equipment on this plaza, but the unmistakable plinking of hammer on anvil drew Martin out into the back alleys. The selection was pathetic; starter gear for the most part with a few vendor trash items in amongst them. The only vaguely interesting weapon – a little axe with a faint glow about it – was so far out of his price range that the Wulvan behind the counter wouldn’t even let him touch it. After a few minutes of haggling, he managed to acquire a fragile looking Obsidian Gladius [9-16 damage] for the low, low price of only all his savings.

  With the little change he had left over, he managed to snag a hunk of roast pig from one of the spits on his way out of town. He hadn’t been sure what eating in Strata was going to be like, but it proved to be just as immersive an experience as everything else.

  Compared to the crap that he ate in real life, it was probably the single most delicious thing he’d ever tasted, and a quick blink confirmed his suspicion that it had given him a minor buff to stamina regeneration. That was something to keep an eye on for later.

  There was definitely some sort of cooking skill available to players judging by the number of vendors with ridiculous names and classes hovering over their heads in the marketplace, and with the heavy reliance on stamina, being able to up its regeneration rate could prove to be absolutely invaluable.

  [ANNOUNCEMENT: Poke It With A Stick have defeated Carnifex, Tenth Archduke of Strata]

  Based on how often he was seeing that announcement, Martin guessed that Carnifex was the first of the Archdukes that you came across in Strata. The one that reset your spawn point to further in the dungeon when you beat it. The first real milestone towards victory.

  He hadn’t been able to find any information about the Archdukes except in the gear being auctioned off online. Even that hadn’t told him much beyond a few names. He’d seen a couple of items belonging to Carnifex showing up, but the other Archdukes were either stingy with their drops or gave items too valuable to trade away. The names Tortor and Barathrum had also been mentioned on old, closed auctions, but none of them said anything about what deep those individual Archdukes could be found on.

  The journey back to the Deep Gate was uneventful, and without any distractions, Martin made it into the stone chambers again before there was any sign of his guild-mates. Despite the strange moral satisfaction of last night, his extra wandering hadn’t actually provided Martin with either of the two things that he needed. Both the Deep Gate and its key still evaded him, and he desperately wanted either one or the other to present to the rest of Iron Riot whenever they deigned to join him.

  The swamp was vast and wide-reaching, though; it would be much easier to search it with a group spreading out. It was still tempting, because he really wanted to hand in his quest, but it wasn’t going anywhere and he doubted the Anurvan would have run off before he got there.

  The clogged cisterns were another story entirely. Travelling in a big – almost inevitably chattering – group was certain to attract the attention of the other Morasses that were still lurking about, whereas Martin could move with some degree of stealth on his own. Not much, but some.

  With a vague estimate of half an hour before everyone else appeared, Martin set off to methodically fill in any blank spaces on the grid of circles on his map. Most of the spheres he hadn’t visited before were either completely blocked by massed tangles of roots eru
pting through fractures in their ceilings or held one of the many Morasses that he didn’t much fancy facing off against alone again.

  The dark patches on his map continued to deplete, until eventually the only part left was the most distant corner of the deep: a perfectly spherical chamber that was almost devoid of the detritus and muck that characterized the rest.

  The engravings stood out in stark relief on the stone with no mud to mask them, and not one but two of the lumbering guardians stood watch over the tunnel leading out the other way. That was looking more promising.

  At some point he had lost track of time, and he really didn’t want Lindsay making a beeline right to him and dragging a train of all the enemies he’d snuck around, so he turned tail and hiked back to the chamber where they’d logged out the night before.

  It seemed he was just in the nick of time. Julia and Jericho appeared moments after his return, the pillars of light staggered by only a few seconds. Julia gave him a lipless smile and a nod. “Good evening.”

  Jericho was less polite, electing to pick Martin up bodily and start swinging him around. “What do you think? Fast-ball special?”

  Martin sighed as he hung boneless in the Wulvan’s massive paws. “You’d probably get better distance with Lindsay. Corvan have hollow bones. She might be bigger than me, but she weighs about half as much.”

  Jericho dropped him, and Martin just barely got his feet under him before he hit the murky puddle at the bottom of the cistern. Jericho nodded.

  “Solid advice. Where is she, anyway?”

  Lindsay appeared in a pillar of light, bellowing at the top of her lungs, “What’s up, minions!”

  Martin rolled his eyes. “Nice of you to join us.” Why had she chosen a character that relied on stealth?

  Lindsay took a bow, and despite the beak Martin was almost entirely certain that she was smirking.

  “You still bitter I turned down your proposal? I don’t know what to tell you, Martin, I’m just not the marrying type.”

  Jericho let out a little huff of laughter and opened his mouth to make some snide comment before he was cut off.

  “Good evening,” Julia repeated in an almost identical intonation to the way she’d said it mere seconds before.

  When Martin glanced over, her eyes were shut, but they were also moving beneath those translucent reptilian eyelids. She must have been raking through menus, completely oblivious.

  “I think I know where we need to head next,” said Martin. “I’ve been scouting ahead a little and there’s a passageway out of these cisterns being guarded by two of the golems.”

  “Scouting ahead a little?” Lindsay scoffed. “Do you ever sleep?”

  Martin shrugged. “I sleep. I just got logged in early.”

  “What about eating? Did you eat something before you—”

  This was starting to verge on Gillian’s concern-trolling. Martin cut her off. “What are you, my mother now?”

  Anyone else would have recognized the edge in his voice. Even a stranger would have backed down. Lindsay didn’t. She didn’t seem to know how to.

  “I don’t know, I got around a lot when I was a toddler… were you adopted?”

  Martin bit back an angry retort, took a deep breath of the humid air and started over.

  “Two guards, probably guarding something. Or there’s a massive swampy area at the other end of the tunnel we came in through initially. The odds are the key is in one direction, the gate in the other.”

  Jericho and Julia nodded along to that, but Lindsay was on a roll. “All right, son, we’ll try your plan, but if it doesn’t work, you’re grounded.”

  Martin groaned. “Please stop.”

  “Sorry, son, it’s dad jokes from now until the end of time. You’ve unleashed my final form. Big Daddy Lindsay.”

  Jericho just walked away from her. Martin and Julia looked at each other for an instant and then hurried off after. Lindsay was left to cackle alone for almost a whole minute before she realized she’d been abandoned and rushed after them.

  Guiding the other three members of the guild through the grid of cisterns was a little like herding cats, particularly when they were passing by chambers with Faceless Morasses inside. Lindsay was of the opinion that every monster needed to die on the altar of experience points. Martin didn’t want to squander their time or their resources.

  The other two were incredibly focused on pushing forward – hardly surprising given that they’d just seen Martin and Lindsay jump past a week’s worth of progress to catch up to the two of them – and they had served as the tiebreaker every time the argument came up, falling in line with Martin’s plan to push on.

  Lindsay barged into the middle of the group, mumbling, “This isn’t a democracy, you know. I am in charge.”

  Jericho reached down to pet her on her feathered head. “Yes, you are. You’re the boss.”

  Her mumbling turned to louder grumbling. “I am the boss.”

  Julia chimed in. “Nobody would deny that you are the boss.”

  She received one of Lindsay’s patented death-glares. “Then why are you following him and ignoring me?”

  Julia and Jericho both answered at the same time, talking over one another but both fairly distinct thanks to her voice being helium high and his being deep enough to be mistaken for roadworks.

  She chirped, “Because he knows where we are going?”

  He rumbled, “Because his plan isn’t completely stupid.”

  Martin pretended he couldn’t hear the conversation going on behind him. This was far from the first time they’d had this discussion, and Lindsay wasn’t actually a megalomaniac, no matter what her cackling and jokes about world domination might otherwise indicate.

  Lindsay was feigning a sulk, trying to lean on one of the curved chamber walls when she found the glitch. With so many rotations the night before, some part of the game world hadn’t properly aligned in the exact spot where she was leaning. It looked like a solid wall, but she passed through it like air. It was pure luck that Jericho was looking in the right direction when it happened, and pure instinct that had him leaping to catch her ankle before she vanished through the wall entirely. When he hauled her back in, she was rasping and gasping. “I want to go again!”

  Martin approached the wall and felt his way along carefully until it gave way beneath his finger pads. It wasn’t cold on the other side. There was no breeze; it was as though he was feeling nothing at all, like when they were disembodied during character creation or death. Nervously, he poked his head through the hole in the wall and looked out.

  On the other side of the wall was a darkness richer and more all-consuming than anything Martin had ever experienced. Not just the absence of light, but something darker still. His eyes couldn’t adjust to it; it was like he had gone blind, until he looked down and saw the whole dungeon of Strata arrayed beneath them. From the outside it was like a great puzzle, with no hint beyond the color of the stone as to what each deep held, but there they were, slowly being shifted and shuffled around by the Masters who hung immobile in the darkness.

  Looking out to the sides, Martin could see the deep that they were in along with a half-dozen others, great caverns up next to where the surface of the earth should be, identical Beachheads all funneling people from all around the world down into the lower levels where they would mingle. There was no sign of the world aboveground. The dungeon was all that Strata comprised.

  Lindsay yanked him back and tried to squeeze by him before he caught her by the collar. “Oh, no. None of that.”

  “Come on, dude. We could hop out there, climb down a few floors, pop back in. They can’t blame us for exploiting a glitch they put in.”

  “They can and they will. You try that crap and they’re going to ban us all.”

  Lindsay’s beak snapped shut but there was a glimmer of rebellion in her eyes. She wasn’t going to let this go. She let them draw her away, but the idea had already taken root in her head. She was going to t
hrow herself out of the game world as soon as she got the opportunity.

  The chambers on either side of the one they were heading to had been completely blocked by collapse and root incursions. It was a bottleneck that they were going to have to pass through if they wanted to go any further. The designers were smart enough to make it seem coincidental while still putting in a really obvious trap. Now he just had to work out how to turn it against them.

  A toe-to-toe fight with a pair of Morasses was likely to drag on for quite some time, and while Martin was certain they would be able to slog it out, that solution seemed inelegant. He thought back to his battle with the Morass the previous night.

  If he’d just held onto the Rain Tear Crystal, he probably could have used it as bait to draw one of the guardians out. As it was, they were both standing side by side, blocking access to the far door and facelessly facing towards the only entrance. No way to pull one out and fight it alone; no way to get the drop on them.

  His stomach flipped as he remembered the way that just one morass had been able to toss him around, the sickly sensation of the ground beneath his feet suddenly obeying his enemy. Martin smoothed down his whiskers and grinned.

  “I’ve got a plan, but Lindsay, you’re not going to like it.”

  It took a minute to explain his idea and Lindsay did not like it. Still, they lined up at the chamber’s entrance. Martin diplomatically allowed Lindsay to give the signal.

  “Now!”

  All four of them charged in, shouting out battle-cries – and in Julia’s case, letting out a squeal so high-pitched that only Wulvan could hear it. The Faceless Morasses were happy to oblige, lumbering forward to meet them in the middle of the room and breaking into a charge that should have rolled right over Iron Riot like a truck.

  Martin bellowed, “Split!” and the group leapt in two, with the Morasses plowing right through the gap between them. Martin and Julia backed towards one of the blocked exits, Lindsay and Jericho the other.