Fragments (Somnia Online Book 3), page 21
Riasli cocked her head to one side, madness gleaming from her eyes that reminded Murmur of when Belius had absorbed the first shard she’d found. Didn’t most of the bosses in the world possess those shards? Perhaps the longer those shards stayed within them, the worse the boss became. Had the enchanter been a boss? It would explain the madness if she’d gone rogue once she absorbed it. Which just made it more dangerous since she was so close to real.
“You don’t get to decide what you do.” She twisted her fingers in intricate knots of a pattern Murmur hadn’t seen before. “I’ll decide for you.”
A flash appeared through the air, breaking Murmur’s Mesmerize with ease, which sent her scrambling to replace the Mass Enthrall, which, because of how the bandits fanned out, completely missed two of them. She leveled a glare at Riasli as she readied Shift and released it almost instantaneously, stunning all of them to give her time to Mesmerize the rest of them.
“Oops, guess I didn’t give you that spell. My bad.” The mad enchanter cackled fiercely making Murmur wish she had time to just sink a fist into her face, but violence never solved anything, right?
Murmur ignored her in favor of buffing her guild mates, debuffing the bandits, and Mesmerizing each of the four not currently engaged in combat, all the while watching Riasli gloat out of the corner of her eye. With everything taken care of, she turned her attention back to the trainer.
“What do you want?” She breathed out the words, frustration making it difficult to speak.
“Want?” Riasli seemed to genuinely consider it for a moment. “What I want is for you not to be here. Everything would go so much more smoothly without you. You were never meant to connect like this!”
Murmur gaped at her. What exactly did she mean?
“Excellent. Let’s get together sometime and have tea. Must catch up later—you seem so busy now.” And with a loud bang, Riasli disappeared, leaving four broken Mezmerizes in her wake.
Murmur managed to get off her Shift spell again just in time to stun five of the six bandits. Even with her renewed speed and concentration, it was easier to cast the stun than the Mass Enthrall. But the bandit with burnt orange fur resisted and headed straight toward her, his eyes gleaming maniacally. She got the distinct feeling these creatures were held under the thrall of Riasli but couldn’t quite understand how. Were there sincerely spells she’d not given Murmur, or had she just been playing mind games?
This time she targeted him with Stupefy, freezing him in place. Nullify made the rounds again, and this time when she Mez’d him, it stuck. With Riasli not in sight, all they had to do was fight the bandits.
But it seemed the bandits in front of them had a measure of fanaticism instilled in them. Their fighting was leagues above what they’d experienced before, and Murmur kicked herself for not being more prepared. Buffing as they fought was the single worst thing support classes could do. It drained mana like a tap turned onto full. Her kingdom for a decent mana drain.
Rash was holding her own nicely against one of the lighter calico bandits. Taking them down two at a time was only logical, since they had two full groups. The monk’s gloves smashed into the bandit’s body, just before she melted away when her opponent attempted to hit her. Catlike reflexes were perfect for a monk. She twisted and ducked, her face fierce and her eyes blazing. Murmur really wanted to know the story behind this reaction, because Dansyn didn’t seem to feel as strongly.
Devlish, Sinister, and Havoc each plied their targets with strong life draining DoTs. Devlish didn’t take much damage, which left Sinister to do more harm to the mobs than usual with a constant stream of converted healing trickling back to the group. Murmur refreshed the Mez on each of the other bandits, weakening and slowing all of them she could reach. There was still something off about these fights.
Almost like their opponent’s movements lacked fire or passion. Like they were just reacting and acting robotically. She worried more and more that they were under a spell. And even as she tried to Cancel Magic on them and remove any hostile effects, it wasn’t possible, it wasn’t changing anything. Then she attempted to charm them too.
This target cannot be placed under your influence. You do not have the required stamina to do this. Don’t try to take on situations that are over your head.
Havoc moved over to her, concentration pinching his face as he directed his pet to use several scythe swings. But the feles were agile and adept fighters. Their armor was difficult to pierce. The few levels they had on the group didn’t help either.
“What’s wrong?” Havoc asked her, genuine concern in his voice. “You’ve got that what the fuck expression on your face.”
Murmur struggled to recast a Mez that got resisted. “ Their fighting is too mechanical and not what I’d come to expect from experienced bandits. Which leads me to wonder why they’re fighting us at all.”
Murmur glanced at her friend out of the corner of her eye, wondering if he knew just how difficult it was to keep this many targets Mez’d for this long. Havoc raised an eyebrow, not stopping his casting for even a moment, as their target finally began to wear down. “They’re fighting to not die?”
Murmur shook her head, casting a shield over Snowy as she did. One hundred fifty hit points of damage absorption wasn’t much, but it helped. She gestured toward the target they were currently facing, debuffing him again as she did so. “ Most targets have a reason. But his left arm is hanging by a tendon and he’s not adjusting for it. See?”
She continued her rotation of spells as the brown furred feles just continued attacking. But it paused in the middle of each one, as if he was still expecting the almost severed limb to work. In fact, it was like he used his own rotation and stuck to it regardless of the situation. He switched between four specific attacks and rinse-and-repeated them every time. Only one of them was empty right now. His life drained fast, as it would with a hacked off arm.
“I see what you mean.” Havoc frowned.
Murmur focused on the fight in front of them, choosing not to answer quite yet. Her head was fully of timing her rotations and trying to figure the whole situation out. One wrong move could be fatal for any of them, but if she made a wrong move, she could kill all of them. shrugged, biting her lip. She was grateful that he let her fight in silence, and could see he was watching them intently himself. Outside of just applying DoTs and debuffs, understanding the opponent was one way to win.
Murmur shifted her attention away from Havoc, and tried to extend her Shield Expansion, which was going to drain another forty-eight of her MA. However, considering the cost had been reduced on all the others she was maintaining, it wasn’t too dire. But again, she was blocked from it.
You do not have the mastery to shield forced enemies. Please raise your Mental Affinity to enable this. Stop dilly-dallying.
Murmur raised an eyebrow at the text. Frustration ate away at her, and she counted to three in her mind. There wasn’t time for ten. Fine then, if she couldn’t help these bandits out from whatever spell they were under, she’d just have to help kill them and put them out of their misery.
Killing the bandits gave her little joy. Not only had she fallen into another enchanter’s trap, but she wasn’t nearly strong enough to be a real threat. Add in the fact that these bandits had been charmed against her to fight to the death, and it was shaping up to be a bad day. Murmur was going to have to go and see Belius, because if nothing else, she knew she could strong arm him into giving her what she needed. Or at least, that was the hope. He might try and bargain for a Getashi, but she’d figure that out when she came to it.
Meanwhile, it was her fault these bandits had ended up like this. It only made sense that she had to free them no matter what it took. Killing in Somnia was starting to take on darker undertones than she liked.
“Well.” Rashlyn brushed her hands against each other as she stood up after checking the bandits for loot. “That has to have been the shittiest fight we’ve had so far.”
“It took forever,” Exbo muttered, sheathing his bow.
“Did anyone else feel a little sorry for them?” Rashlyn piped up, her tone somber. “I mean sure I wanted to kill them at first, but… I’m not even sure they were the culprits. And they just kept fighting, no matter what.”
“They were under another enchanter’s thrall, and I couldn’t break it.” She still couldn’t quite get passed the initial feeling of total inferiority. She didn’t like that. Murmur never played a game to be second best, not even to the NPCs, or possessed people, or whatever it was that Riasli had become. It was becoming more and more apparent that Somnia wasn’t really a game.
Riasli wasn’t the normal villain; she wasn’t the dastardly stereotype that could be caught and defeated. Murmur needed to check and see if she’d been robbed of any abilities by the scheming trainer.
“Mur. You hit thirty-two.” Devlish pulled her out of her thoughts.
“What?” She checked, and sure enough, she’d leveled up. Not that it was unexpected, just that she thought she’d have noticed a ding in the monotonous fight that had meant putting those bandits out of their misery. “Oh. Well. At least we gained something from that fight.”
“You gained. Remember? You gained.” Havoc crossed his arms. “We’ve all died a tad more.”
“Speaking of dying, do you have coffins now?” Murmur grinned at him, trying to keep her minor guilt at that fact at bay. Next time all her friends logged out, she was going to run some tests about the whole logging out thing.
“Why yes, yes I do. I got them at twenty-nine, but I have to buy or craft the fuckers and carry some on me.” Havoc rummaged in his inventory. “I only have five, so make sure none of you die in difficult spots too much.”
“Anyone else get anything interesting?” Murmur scanned everyone, knowing they would have and being totally aware that she’d have yet another fifty or so skills to categorize. Her head was starting to feel full.
“Combat Res.” Sinister shrugged. “It has some restrictions on it, so I’m unsure exactly how useful it’ll be, and has a long ass recast on it. We’ll see.”
“Combat Resurrection?” Murmur smiled. “Don’t suppose it gives any experience return?”
“Nope. Not yet. My new normal res does. A whopping twenty-five percent returned.” Sinister rolled her eyes. “Not planning on using it on you though. Don’t get any ideas.”
They’d stood still long enough. Murmur looked down at the corpses as they began to decay. Their rate was slower than usual, perhaps a side effect of whatever spell they’d been held under. Maybe they wouldn’t respawn, which would be sad. But if they did respawn she wished she could locate them and figure out just what had been done to them. She wished that maybe she could tell them she was sorry. In a way, they reminded her of the Loch’ni’dar. If this had happened to them… It wasn’t something she wanted to think about.
“Merlin, Exbo, Jinna? Can you scout around and check out the ruins? I have no idea what sort of ruins they are, but we need info and you guys have that stealthy thing you do.” She turned around, squinting at the light through the trees, determined to take charge, to progress in the way they now needed to. “Take half an hour or so? Unless you run into trouble, then call for us, but we need to know how long it’s going to take to get through any perimeter monsters. We can’t go into the dungeon the same way we did with Hightower. We were so sleep deprived we made some really stupid mistakes.”
Sin frowned as she sidled over, placing a gentle hand on Murmur’s shoulder. “Are you okay?”
Murmur shook her head as she watched the rangers and rogue move out into the deeper part of the jungle. Something was nagging at the back of her mind that she couldn’t quite place. “No. I’m not. It’s taken us almost a full in-game day to get here. Which means by the time you all sleep again, we’re going to have almost a full real day in between levels. That’s far too much time for people to catch up to us.”
“Exodus is pretty far behind us, Mur.” Sin added quietly. “What’s really wrong?”
Murmur weighed her words, looking at her oldest friend and decided to be completely blunt. “I get the distinct feeling Riasli has gone off script. This doesn’t feel like the usual organic quest lines we trigger. So now I have to wonder, if she went off script, just who or what is controlling her and how real is all this becoming?”
Somnia Online
Fable’s Castle - Mikrum Isle
Day Thirteen Post Launch
Telvar looked up from the workbench he was standing next to while helping Neva infuse another set of armor for Murmur. It appeared his favorite enchanter had a sixth sense about her, as she materialized on the home port with Snowy by her side.
“Murmur.” He said with genuine fondness as he strode out from the workshop. “You look...consternated. What’s wrong?”
She eyed him appraisingly, as if she wasn’t sure how much she could trust him. It was a little disappointing, but Telvar supposed it was to be expected.
“How much do you know about Riasli?” She stood with one hand on her hip, while the other gripped her staff tightly. If he hadn’t known it was impossible, he would have said the dragons around the staff’s gem were writhing.
“Riasli... an enchanter NPC over in Curet.” He frowned at Murmur as he tried to locate the NPC, but for some reason the system wasn’t allowing him to find her. “Why?”
“Just an NPC, not an enchanter trainer?” Murmur’s gaze was full of an unusual intensity and Telvar hesitated, still scanning for the NPC.
He finally spied her in the jungles of Curet, heavily warded and shielded with all manner of psionic and enchanter means. She was difficult to get a hold on, so much that he frowned with the effort. “That’s very odd. She was just an enchanter NPC for the trainer hall in...oh.”
He cringed. It seemed the actual enchanter trainer from Curet had met an unfortunate accident in the back room of the guild hall. Along with about three other NPCs. The latter three were in the process of decaying at the normal rate, but Pushkin was not. She was held in a type of stasis that slowly ate away at her hit points, something that Telvar knew he hadn’t introduced to the game, and was fairly certain no one else had. At least not either of his AI siblings.
“What’s happened?” he asked Murmur, forthright as usual. It seemed to work best with her. And he didn’t need to give her all the information yet.
Murmur frowned. “You need to get your NPCs under control. She posed as a trainer, gave me a few choices of abilities and spells, and the next time I saw her she was hostile, with a group of guards under her thrall, who were fighting mechanically like pre-programmed robots and were damned hard to kill. They murdered some of the L’tigri and had no emotions whatsoever. I couldn’t sense jack shit from them. It was really bloody weird.”
She sounded rattled, something that Murmur rarely let herself be. Telvar had to fight down his concern for her and make sure he was checking all viable avenues about this NPC. “Did she give you the scribing ability?”
“The what now?” Murmur crossed her arms, glaring at him. “Nothing of the sort. She gave me the choices for my Mental Affinity upgrades. I chose Forcefield Push and Phantom.”
“Those are the only choices you could make?” Telvar’s tone was suddenly stern as he ran through a heap of calculations in his head. “You should have had one more choice. It may be that she didn’t get that choice herself. You’ll need to go and see an actual trainer. I sadly can’t give them to you.”
“Can’t or won’t?” At least now she half smiled at him.
“Can’t if I don’t want the others to jump on me and try and take away any other powers I have. We divided them up before the game launched, and we each have our areas of expertise. I am not a trainer, so I cannot help you with that.” Telvar inclined his head in apology. “Sorry, I wish I could, but it’s better that you go and see my brother.”
“Brother?” Murmur cocked her head to one side with a sigh. “There’s nothing even remotely like a resemblance between you. I’d best be going. Just wanted to let you know about Riasli.”
She tapped her Tiachi on the head, summoning her mount, and hovered away just as Neva called out to her: “Don’t forget to come back and get your armor upgrade!”
Telvar chuckled and watched the annoyance on the little luna’s face.
“She never thinks about herself ever!” The girl stomped her foot, as if trying to fight off the worry in her eyes and turned to glare at Telvar. “Next time remind her, the better her armor is, the more protected she’ll be.”
And then she stomped off back to her workbench and continued her work.
Telvar watched as Murmur quickly grew smaller in the distance and turned back to watch Neva. The thing was, he didn’t think the armor was what would protect Murmur. Whatever else there was in Somnia, elements attacked the mind, and her real mind was stuck here for now. They’d done the only thing they could to protect her—they’d given her the enchanter class.
And now he was no longer sure that’d be enough. He needed to talk to his siblings as soon as he could before he broke down and told her that as far as he could see Riasli had developed on her own.
Back on Tarishna, it didn’t take long for Murmur to get from Mikrum Isle to her home town now that she had a mount. Maybe next time she’d seek out Jan just to catch up, but the truth was she didn’t need the wagons anymore. Having her own mount with her constantly chattering tiny companion was the best convenience.
The Stellaein enchanter guild hadn’t changed in the week or so since Murmur last stepped foot in it. There were still a healthy number of low-level enchanters, even if the room wasn’t crowded. Elvita’s face lit up with a huge smile when she saw Murmur enter the building.
“Murmur! It’s been a while. You’ve grown.” She looked Murmur up and down, her gaze appraising. “Yes, you’ve definitely grown.”
