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

by G. D. Penman

  The one Master that Martin had met seemed to be a raging power-mad asshole, but judging from the quality and depth of the game Martin still found himself trusting that the Masters as a group would design a balanced experience overall. Besides, competence and nicety didn’t always go hand in hand. He was living proof of that.

  Jericho strode up to the closest campfire and woofed out a loud greeting that made half of the gathered guild flinch.

  “How is your run going?”

  The nearest Sythvan, a knight called Cobranan, waved to them half-heartedly as they approached. “Not bad so far. What about yourselves?”

  If Lindsay were there, she would have been gushing with details of their adventures so far, telling Cobranan every secret that Martin was intent on keeping; exploding mushrooms, roaming monsters, NPCs disguised as monsters and their solution to the problem of the Morasses.

  Instead, Martin only had to contend with Jericho, who for all his loudness was normally as communicative as a brick wall. Julia had the sense to keep to herself too, although it was out of respect for Martin’s plans rather than any of the antisocial habits the rest of them seemed to cultivate.

  The chatter went on, with Martin paying only a little attention as tales were traded and Jericho’s rumbling laughter provided percussion. He closed his eyes to a reminder.

  [LEVEL UP]

  Skaife Murovan Exorcist

  Strength: 9 Agility: 8

  Endurance: 9 Willpower: 7

  LEVEL 5

  You have 3 points to assign.

  It was nice to have committed to a development path; it made life much easier. At least for these few moments there was no indecision to contend with.

  Strength: 12 Agility: 8

  Endurance: 9 Willpower: 7

  Health: 45 Stamina: 58

  You may select 1 new ability.

  Smite – Your next successful melee attack deals an additional 7 light damage.

  [20-second cooldown]

  Lay on Hands – Restores 100% of an ally’s health. Reduces your stamina and stamina regeneration by 10% for 5 minutes.

  [60-minute cooldown]

  Rite of Passage – Unlocks any Gate without requiring the key.

  [72-hour cooldown]

  And just like that, the indecision was back again. Not about his ability selection this time – Rite of Passage remained by far the most valuable ability – but for his continuing strategy of dumping all his stat points into strength.

  It didn’t take a genius to work out that the damage Smite dealt was tied directly to a character’s willpower score. 7 willpower; 7 damage.

  Suddenly, willpower became a valuable stat all over again. It converted directly into extra damage, and unlike strength, it wasn’t going to be tempered by the enemy’s armor score.

  Sure, he could only use Smite once every twenty seconds, but if he was using Celestial Strike every ten and Trinity Strike every thirty, it could fill in one of the long gaps in his rotation instead of normal hits.

  More importantly, if it was part of the design trend for exorcist abilities it meant that there would be more direct conversion of willpower to damage in the later unlocks. Martin had suspected that the willpower-to-damage conversion abilities had been reserved for the martyrs and invokers; this changed his perspective.

  Maybe the exorcist really was going to be a full jack of all trades. Perhaps next he’d unlock a ranged attack, or the ability to sneak, or damage absorption. It would make for a character class without much focus, but when all the bases for a group were already covered, surely having that flexibility to shore up weak spots was the greatest value that could be brought to the table.

  He selected Rite of Passage for now. Then his eyes snapped open at the sound of his name.

  “—this moron, he tried to befriend the little frog people. He even gave them names. Like pets.”

  Jericho really should have known better. Martin interjected before the fool said too much.

  “Shame they turned out to be feral and attacked us in the end. I guess they were just cowards, rather than friendly,” he said, as nonchalantly as he could.

  The Sythvan invoker, Hespith, made an amused little hiss at that. “Did you think this was a monster ranch game? With cuddles as prizes?”

  Martin didn’t know how to fake bashful, so he shrugged. “I just thought it would be handy to have someone to carry our stuff.”

  Jericho laughed, and clapped him on the back so hard he nearly fell into the fire. “Always looking for short-cuts, this one.”

  Their knave was staring at Martin intently, tapping an elegant finger against the scales where lips would be on a human. “Iron Riot. Iron Riot. Haven’t I heard that name before?”

  Julia smiled. “We used to raid back in Dracolich. We had a few world firsts.”

  Hespith’s attention snapped her way.

  “Oh? So you’re the stiff competition, are you? The ones to watch? We used to raid in Dracolich, a while back now. Been playing Strata since launch, you see. Back then, we never got any world firsts, but we made it through everything all right.”

  Martin tried to be subtle, but talking wasn’t his strong point. “And how does Strata compare?”

  “This place… this is something else. You’ve only just stuck your toes in the shallow end, let me tell you. It gets worse every deep you go down. Not just harder but… scarier too. Weirder. We’ve lost more guildies to the fear than to the fight.”

  Jericho scoffed. “It is only a game.”

  Hespith’s gaze turned towards the water, but she wasn’t really seeing it. Her eyes were unfocused.

  “Jezebel is going to be the next to go. You can already see her straining at the edges. She hardly even talks any more. Says she’s been dreaming about things before they happen. Says she can hear the Archdukes down below, whispering to her.”

  Even Jericho’s bluster faltered at that. “What do they say to her?”

  Hespith didn’t even give him a sideways glance. “Why don’t you go ask her?” she said.

  She nodded over at the pool. There was a Sythvan body lying beside it. Martin had mistaken it for a corpse at first glance, but now he could see the back of her armor rising and falling. She was still breathing, no matter what else had happened to her.

  Martin considered it for a moment, then strode off towards the water. If nothing else, this would be a good time waster so that Lindsay had a better chance of catching up to them.

  Sane people also had a habit of playing their cards a little close to their chest. A chat with this Jezebel might shake loose some details about what they were going to face in the lower deeps, even if they were part of a ramble about tinfoil hats.

  He pondered whether to prod her with his toe or not when she didn’t look up at his arrival, but it seemed rude, not to mention counterproductive, so he lay down on his front beside her and looked out over the flat surface of the pool. One of her fingers, claws really, was trailing over the top of the water.

  The ripples danced out across the surface, rebounding off the sides, forming complex patterns determined by the movements of the Sythvan’s hand.

  “The water is what gave it away.”

  Martin nearly jumped when he heard her speak. He’d expected to spend a few minutes trying to coax her into talking, trying to drag her back to reality from whatever fantasy she was currently occupying.

  “Gave what away?”

  She sighed.

  “No game has ever made water look so real. Even if a game could, would your computer be able to render it so perfectly, with every drop changing the course of all the rest? I know that mine would not. It barely scraped the necessary requirements to run this game at all.”

  Martin lay as perfectly still as he could. He didn’t want to startle her, but he was fighting every instinct to turn from the water and look at her face. It would have sounded completely deranged if he hadn’t already been thinking along the same lines. The water right in front of his face just made it worse,
rippling at the touch of an unseen breeze, ever shifting, sparkling and impossibly beautiful in the dim firelight.

  “If it isn’t a game, what is it?”

  “Don’t you already know the answer? This is real life. We aren’t playing a game or sharing a dream. We are travelling to a different world. A world just as real as our own, but different. Distant and strange.”

  Her voice began to waver the longer she spoke. As if she was not used to speaking anymore.

  “There are things that a maker of games just could not know. That they would not consider. There are details here that no rational mind would furnish a game with.”

  If he challenged this delusion, he was probably going to make her angry, but if he played along, he might make things worse. “You think this is all real?”

  “The question isn’t what I think, it is what I know to be true.” She dipped her fingers into the water, spreading new hypnotic patterns. “Every one of my senses tells me that this is real life. That this is my own real life, and that the one I have outside of this dungeon is a trick. A distraction. Maybe I never had a real life at all before I came here. Maybe this is all just another of Strata’s tricks. It makes us think we are someone else, someone who has not come to kill it.”

  Martin stood up abruptly. This was all sounding too reasonable. His own real life seemed almost impossibly bland and pointless when he compared it to the grand mission that he had here in Strata. He didn’t believe madness was infectious, and he didn’t believe that this game was a portal to another world, because both of those ideas were fantasy. But he could follow the train of thought, and it led nowhere good.

  There were some good points buried in all that crazy. Nobody had any idea how the NIH technology worked; they had no idea how a world this rich could be emulated using crappy old computers that barely managed to run the last generation’s VRMMOs.

  Strata might have been a race, but it was even more of a mystery, and he was becoming increasingly convinced that solving that mystery was how he was going to win that race. Nobody understood the first thing about Strata. Even the things that Martin would state as plain fact could have been entirely wrong, shaped by his own extrapolations.

  He needed to know who made the game. To find out how it worked. If he couldn’t find out, then he might very well end up like the broken mind laid out at his feet.

  Jezebel did not look up, but she talked on as though he were still beside her. Just barely loud enough for him to hear.

  “You’ll see that I am right in time. You’ll shake off the lies that the Heart of Strata is feeding you. Then, when you do, you’ll hear them. You’ll hear them whispering in the deep, in the dark. It is only a matter of time.”

  He moved away as quietly as he could, but once he was back at the campfire, Martin still couldn’t shake off Jezebel’s words. It was like they kept echoing in his head. A frightful mirror held up to his own suspicions, and the places they could take him.

  He had no intention of going mad. He wasn’t obsessed with Strata. Or if he was, it was just the regular obsession he’d experienced with every game he’d ever played in his life. It wasn’t something special. It was just a game. It was only a game. A puzzle for him to solve. A prize for him to win.

  He blinked dully when he realized somebody had said his name.

  “Huh?”

  Cobranan hissed with amusement. “She really creeped you out, nah?”

  Martin nodded. “Scary to think that could happen to any of us.”

  “Nah, she was always a weird one.” When the Sythvan shook his head it was sinuous, like the ripples in the water. “Always way too into her games. Played all night instead of sleeping. Lost her job. I don’t know the last time she logged out. Every time we come back into the game, she’s already there.”

  Julia frowned. “Do any of you know how to contact her in real life?” she asked.

  Cobranan shrugged. Another ripple. “Nah, we’re just online friends. I don’t even know what country she’s in.”

  “Isn’t there some sort of reporting system?”

  Martin hated to even suggest involving the Masters, given what he now knew about them, but a life was literally on the line here. If you didn’t come out of the game, your body in the real world would die eventually, of starvation if nothing else.

  “There has to be something we can do to get her out of here and get her the help she needs,” he said.

  Jericho rumbled, “You can’t help people who won’t help themselves. If we force her out, she’ll just come right back again.”

  “And she’ll come back alone, where we can’t be around to help her,” Cobranan added.

  Hespith stared over at the limp snake-woman on the ground. “She must be logging out sometimes. If she… it’s been weeks. If she wasn’t logging out at all then she’d already be... she wouldn’t still be here. She must be taking breaks. She must.”

  “Have you tried killing her?” Martin asked.

  They all turned to stare at him in abject horror.

  “I don’t mean be obvious about it,” he blurted, “but you could just put her in the way of harm? If she’s dead, she can’t play.”

  “For half an hour,” Cobranan grumbled.

  Martin waited for someone to contradict him, but they all remained silent. So, despite the depths they’d delved to, they had only died once each. Interesting.

  Maybe the game just felt too real for them to risk themselves. No wonder they were struggling to push through the harder deeps if they were too timid to die.

  Hespith cocked her head to one side. “It might be enough to snap her out of it?”

  “She’s fine,” Cobranan scoffed. “This guy... he’s just trying to screw us up. Sure, Jez has gone a bit cuckoo, but she still fights like crazy. Hell, I’d say she fights better now she thinks this is real life. And it isn’t like we’re going to be here forever, you know? She just has to keep it together until we win the game. When will that be, a few months? Tops?”

  Martin saw Julia’s hackles rise, almost literally. She couldn’t stand that sort of callous comment at the best of times. Even jokes like that set her teeth on edge. He had seen it in the early days of the guild, when he’d given serious consideration to cutting her from the raid team, before he’d realized that she was enough of an asset to balance out the disruption to the usual gallows humor.

  Her eyes narrowed at the other Sythvan. “You seem very confident.”

  Cobranan didn’t even look at her. “Why wouldn’t I be? We made it to fifty without breaking a sweat last time, and this time we’ve got all our progression planned out. Optimized. This isn’t like Dracolich. You aren’t going to beat us to the endgame this time.”

  Martin held up his paws.

  “We’re all just here to have a good time. Whoever wins, wins. I’m not going to shed any tears over it. Not when there’s so much game to explore.”

  Cobranan’s head snapped around. “What are you saying? That you’re out of the race?”

  Jericho’s rumbling laugh drew their attention. “We all play the game. We all want to win. No reason we can’t get along until the time when we can’t.”

  Hespith smiled up at him and Julia’s eyes narrowed all over again. That jealousy could be a very useful lever later on, if Martin ever needed to convince their mild-mannered pacifist that violence was the answer.

  He wondered for a moment what the Sin-flipped version of the hierophant would be. Some sort of ranged caster, probably.

  The conversation ran dry after that, and Jericho began to eye the exits on the far end of the cavern floor. It seemed Lindsay’s time was up. Martin cast one last glance back at Jezebel by the pool and inspiration struck.

  “Dinner time.”

  Julia and Jericho both turned to him in amazement. The big Wulvan’s mouth was hanging open, his tongue lolling out.

  Julia almost whispered, “You have never suggested that we stop for a break. Not ever. What’s wrong? Is your house on fire?”
r />   Martin gave her a half smile.

  “We need to remember our real lives if we don’t want to end up like...” He trailed off, looking back towards the water.

  Jericho nodded. “Yes. Food is a good plan.”

  “If we just take five minutes, that gives Lindsay time to get logged back in and start heading down. Jumping in and out of the game to talk to her is going to be a nuisance otherwise.”

  “Hah. I knew you had ulterior motives.” Jericho patted him on the head. “Those cogs are always spinning.”

  “Five minutes,” Martin repeated.

  The other two nodded, then they vanished in a brief, sudden strobing of white. Martin followed right after them, back up into the light.

  Twenty-One

  The Awakening

  He opened his eyes slowly, savoring the dull ache in his muscles and the momentary peace before his senses caught up to this reality. He smiled and his face felt strange, misshapen and flattened.

  Then the noise started. Someone was having sex behind the wall to his left. Below him, someone was screaming at either a pet or a child, although from the tone and volume, Martin hoped like hell it was a pet.

  Above him there was silence, interrupted only by the occasional rattle of synthetic gunfire – another gamer winding down after a week of drudgery. The right wall was probably the least disturbing to Martin – there was a family singing together in some language he didn’t understand.

  Despite the meaningless words, there was warmth in their voices. Joy. They were in the same rat trap as Martin, but they had made it a home.

  Dust drifted through the air above his face, lit up intermittently by the red flashing of his phone’s death-throes. Real life really did suck. It was hardly a surprise that Jezebel preferred the game.