Fragments (Somnia Online Book 3), page 25
“This was way too easy.” Merlin stood with his back leaning against the opposite wall, his eyes on the door in front of him. “Those guards were barely an inconvenience. I feel like they should have been a hell of a lot more trouble.”
Devlish nodded slowly, a thoughtful frown curling his lips. “Yeah it felt like more of a game… and until these mobs, it’s not felt like that.”
Mellow piped up. “She is trying to lure us in. Maybe she thought easy would appeal to us?”
Murmur shook her head, reaching down a hand to tangle it in Snowy’s fur while the wolf let his tongue loll out. “I thought she said she wasn’t going to let us get in, but maybe that wasn’t what she meant. Maybe instead it’s a way of deliberately keeping us from experiencing types of fighting styles we might run into in the ruins. In a sort of—‘you’ll have no idea what you’re expecting’ sort of way.”
“Seems legit.” Merlin shrugged. “Look. At least we’re refreshed.”
Beastial smiled, moving toward the entrance from where he’d sat at the bottom of the steps. “If we go in now, there’s a large chance that we’re not going to get out for a good long while. Merlin’s right. We’re refreshed, far more than we were in Hightower. We can do this.”
“You’re awfully confident for a DPS,” Devlish drawled, a minor hint of irritation under his words.
“Yep. Someone has to be, because our tank is being cautious as fuck.” Beastial’s barb even stung Mur. Maybe he hadn’t gotten over not being a tank this time after all. She’d thought he was happy with beastmaster.
“Let’s not do this and say we did, okay?” Havoc suddenly stood quietly between them. “We don’t need to measure our in-game peens here. You can do that before the next time we log off.”
“Seriously? You’re trying to lecture us about this?” Beastial raised an eyebrow, his tension visible in the set of his shoulders. “Fuck you, Havoc.”
Havocs response was the last thing Murmur expected. He laughed. Threw his head back and laughed. “That’s amazingly droll of you, but at least come up with a better insult than that. Now pull yourselves together and let’s get whatever issues you’re both currently having and take them out on the mobs waiting for us in there.”
Murmur glanced at Sinister to see what her reaction was. The dark elf’s eyes were narrowed, and the frown on her face was full of annoyance. In fact, Murmur was pretty sure she was about to have a word with both of them. They didn’t need to be battling amongst themselves out here though, so she stepped in before the inevitable storm could blow up.
“Why don’t we just open the door and see what awaits us, you know, since none of us can teleport inside?” Murmur softened the words with a smile, but the guys just continued to glare at each other, except Havoc who kept laughing. He wasn’t being any help at all. “Guys, give it a rest. We all want to kill shit. It’s therapeutic. Let’s do it.”
“True that, Mur. True that.” Jinna seemed to be struggling to hold back laughter too. And she knew it wasn’t going to sit well with Beastial or Devlish. While she appreciated the gesture on one hand, she just wanted to go and take care of Riasli.
Just about to speak, Murmur was not prepared for the message that appeared in front of her eyes.
The guild Spiral has defeated Inith Ilan of the Ilinish Threshold and gained one of the twelve keys.
“What the fuck?” Merlin blurted out.
Murmur wondered if she looked as shell-shocked as everyone else. Sure, they were about to hit their second dungeon, but that meant that while they’d been concentrating on keeping Exodus at bay, another guild had crept up on them.
She hadn’t checked the level status of the game for days, and was loath to do it now. What if they’d overtaken them? She hated being behind. Always better to just be in front and not give it up.
“Hmm. A ‘/who all Spiral’ brings up a top level of thirty. In fact, most of them seem to be level thirty.” Havoc frowned, his eyes focused beyond the game. “And Ilinish Threshold appears to be over on Firtulai.”
“Well, looks like we have our work cut out for us, eh?” Beastial elbowed Devlish in the ribs.
“Watch it, you beast lover you.” Devlish winked and returned the elbow.
“Great.” Murmur rolled her eyes and pushed on, trying to not completely give into her desperation. “How about we go in there and do what we need to do to end Riasli?”
Without waiting for an answer, she sidled up to the door and placed her palm against the round circle in the middle. The words around it were barely legible and in a strange script she had to tap into her interface to read. Without a second thought, she pushed against the circle while chanting the words, letting her mind flow with the push and pull from her powers.
She extended her mental shield outward, reinforcing it with a kinetic barrier as her Thought Sensing and Shielding refueled her MA. “Ithis, Meris, grant me entry, for I seek the age of old. Effris, Leshis, grant me grace, as I fight evils untold.”
The door beneath her hand shook as the words and her kinetic barrier made contact. With a rumble they began to roll to the sides, opening to reveal a gaping darkness behind them. No sconces lit the way this time, no guards were in sight, and there was no welcoming person at the beginning to get them started.
A swirl of golden sparkles fluttered around the group, enveloping each of them in turn, but then the darkness swallowed it. Maybe that was the grace the inscription spoke about. All Murmur knew was that it tingled like something that made her feel better and felt dangerous all at once. She had no idea what this grace did, and just as she was about to pull up her HUD to inquire, she heard a grating of stone against stone. Looking up, she barely stopped herself from taking an involuntary step back.
There, in the depths of the blending shadows, they saw movement.
Step over the threshold and keep your promise, lest you feel my wrath.
Well, that was easy, wasn’t it? Hesitantly, they stepped over the threshold, just as the huge approaching shadow began to gain form. It stood at least twenty feet high, and in the fading light as the doors began to close behind them, Murmur realized they were facing a stone statue. Her eyes gradually got used to the darkness, and she watched as it closed in on them, its footsteps rumbling the ground.
Storm Entertainment
Somnia Online Division
Game Development Offices Artificial Intelligence Server Room
Day Thirteen
Laria paced her office, her eyes never leaving the portion of forest her daughter was currently in. Mainly because while she knew that was where Murmur was, she also couldn’t see her daughter. None of that made sense. The tracker allowed her to maintain contact at a distance, and so far, it’d been the one thing holding her together through all of this. But right now, the system said they were all standing outside of the ancient ruins.
An ancient ruin that didn’t quite look like the one she recalled approving for the Cenedril Isle. It no longer even resembled the ruins they’d shown visuals of in the promo material. The homes of the keys were all meticulously arranged, and this one was nothing like its intended incarnation. The rising pyramid modeled on Mayan architecture was no longer. Instead, a smaller version rose up, covered in a slimy moss with a more sinister air. Steps led down instead of up, to what appeared to be an entrance to a maze or labyrinth, and she couldn’t see past the steps. She couldn’t even see the door.
What had the AIs done this time? Did they decide to step in and prevent her from keeping an eye on her daughter? Anything was possible with the way they’d grown in the last days.
What with the change in the ruins and the inability to see into them or even around them, Laria was verging on a state of panic. She took a breath to calm herself and focused. Her husband was right; she’d been letting herself get so caught up in the state of events that she wasn’t thinking clearly any longer.
She’d worked under far more questionable circumstances before. The dev who thought it was oh-so-clever to insert an Easter egg into one game that stripped any female players nearby against their will. That one had been a barrel of harassment suits. Then there was that time when one of the devs decided to mark one of the newbie items with a cautionary message of do not use near fire.
Which for the majority of people was tantamount to telling them to go and light it on fire. Those explosions had caused in-game characters permanent damage, and the GM tickets had gone on for months.
She shook her head, laughing at the past. In its own way it bolstered her bravery. Shit happened in-games, coding fucked up and things went wrong. Perhaps not Michael, Ava, and Wren levels of wrong, but there was a first time for everything.
Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath and activated her communication channel with Shayla. “Hey. Don’t suppose you know what’s going on with the Ruins of Cenedril, do you?”
“Hi, love you too,” Came Shayla’s marginally irritated voice through the earpiece. “Let me check.”
Laria knew without a doubt that Shayla was scrunching her eyes just a little, squinting without realizing it as she activated the augmented reality in her contacts. The action was something she’d done for years, and it helped ground Laria in this reality. She waited, albeit impatiently. Nothing about the game currently involved patience.
“Oh.” Shayla’s confusion came across magnificently in that single syllable. “That’s odd. I take it no one ran this by you? Can you figure out who initiated the change? When did you last check this area?”
“Just before launch and it was fine. I don’t have any information on anyone making changes, not even in the logs. As far as I knew it hasn’t even been touched since launch, not by players or developers. I’m unsure why it’s currently in this...state.” Laria frowned again. “Do you think we’ll be able to access the inside of the dungeon?”
“Sure. We should be able to access everything, right? Maybe only the entrance is inaccessible because of the new positioning of it.” Shayla sounded a lot more confident of her hypothesis than Laria knew she felt. She appreciated her friend trying to make her feel better, and she’d figure out a way to view it somehow.
“Well, I have been trying and I don’t seem to be getting in. It’s glitching or something. Do you think the AIs have anything to do with this?” she grudgingly asked.
“No.” Shayla hesitated. “This doesn’t quite seem like their sort of MO, wouldn’t you say? I mean, they’re not usually this antagonistic. This smacks of someone trying to hide something from us, and I’m not entirely sure how to deal with that. The AI haven’t hidden anything—”
“If you don’t count Michael and Ava.” Laria snapped the words out, immediately regretting them.
“They haven’t hidden anything since then. The fact that they’re achieving sentience isn’t something they’re hiding when we haven’t directly asked them, either.” Shayla’s breath sounded soft over the connection. Laria could almost hear the cogs whirring in her head.
“And? What do you mean?”
“Well, they don’t seem to be able to lie, or at least they don’t feel comfortable lying, right?” A hint of excitement attached itself to her words, traveling down the line like static electricity and made Laria jump.
“Since we haven’t directly asked them if they’re sentient, they’ve neither denied nor confirmed it.” Shayla hurried and continued. “So, if we want to know this, why don’t we just go and ask if they had anything to do with it?”
“How do we know doing that won’t teach them how to lie? I mean, it’s not that they can’t, right? We have no idea.” Something about the situation struck Laria as desperate. The thing was, she didn’t have many other options that came to mind.
“They never actually hid the other damned incidents.” Shayla stamped her foot so loudly that Laria heard it through their link up. “They simply didn’t tell us. Withholding something isn’t quite the same as lying, and it’s very obvious they know the distinction exists.”
“So then, they haven’t told us about this change because either they have no idea, or it’s that we haven’t asked.” Laria could see where Shayla was going with it. And although she tried to fight it, even such a vague straw was something she could cling to.
The statue’s ankle bone was only slightly lower than Jinna. The rest of Jinna barely reached her shins. Her feet trod with a determined approach as the humungous being looked down at them, her staff resting against the floor with a bang. “Who disturbs the crypt of Naishi?”
Crypt of Naishi? Murmur frowned. She hadn’t seen anything that referred to something by that name on the map, nor had she noticed anything but the Ruins of Cenedril in what she’d read in-game. Not even the feles in their own city had mentioned it. Who was this Naishi?
She glanced at the others, knowing that they were waiting for her to speak just like she had the previous time. It worked with Hightower, so maybe it would work here too. Resisting the urge to clear her throat that was suddenly extra dry, Murmur took a small step forward, thus bringing the full brunt of the statue’s focus on herself.
The thing was huge. So tall that her knee caps were higher than Murmur’s head. The stone entrance rose up even past the statue, lending a sense of grandeur that left Murmur in awe. If intimidation was her aim, Riasli couldn’t have picked a better battleground. Mur took a deep breath before speaking.
“The guild of Fable seeks to gain knowledge through the exploration and understanding of this crypt.” Murmur chose her words carefully, backing them with her Thought Projection, with caring and respect, with sufferance and noble intentions.
For a few moments she almost thought it worked. The statue’s stance changed for an instant, and an almost relaxed stance took over. But the enchanter relaxed her hold on the words just a few moments too soon. The statue snapped back to attention, eyes glowing red momentarily, and her stone lips spread in a snarl.
“You are not righteous. You do not seek for anyone but yourself. You are enemies of the Naishi-dan.” The statue lifted her staff several feet high and brought it back down on the ground with a resounding thud that made the ground underneath them tremor so strongly, a few of them lost their footing.
The red glow to her eyes faded, but the damage had been done. A pale orange light rippled out from where the staff thundered down upon the ground in a wave of power that moved back from the statue and into the catacombs beyond them. Murmur didn’t know what they’d triggered, but she was fairly sure the statue had armed some kind of defense system.
Maybe she’d been kidding herself, but since they’d solved most of the last dungeon they attended through solving riddles, she had hoped the need to fight would be negligible in all of the ones they came to face. How naïve.
“The deeper you tread, the more you will face. We will not back down from protecting this place.” And the huge statue, the apparent protector of the entire entrance, fell back into a fighting stance, her staff at the ready, dwarfing the entire group beneath her like bugs ready to be squished.
“How the fucking hell are we supposed to fight something this size?” Beastial growled at the calf in front of him. The huge lacerta looked like a doll beneath the giant. “Are we supposed to jab it in the leg and hope it doesn’t swat us like mosquitos?”
“This place holds a key. We don’t have a choice.” Murmur was proud of her voice for coming out steadier than she expected. “Eventually we’re going to have to kill these stone giants.”
“But they’re stone.” Havoc crossed his arms, his tone pouting. “I won’t be near as much use on these fights. I can’t even use my new necrosis spell. It was bad enough that the Fissures reduced the damage of most of my attacks, now there’s a whole damn dungeon.”
He didn’t seem to be worried, more like irritated he couldn’t use most of his spells to their full strength. Murmur was about to speak when Mellow beat her to it.
“Acid might work on stone.” Their voice was calm and rational, like they’d decided to tackle the problem while everyone else got worked up over how huge their opponents were. “I’ve been thinking about it since we had difficulty with that Fissure on the way here. I doubt fire will have too much effect since there’s no visible tar, and maybe wind. I don’t have an air potion though.”
“Mind magic definitely isn’t going to work.” Murmur realized how ineffectual whatever it was Riasli was doing to these mobs was making her. “I know I almost had it. Just a stronger push and...”
Merlin laid a hand on Murmur’s wrist, just long enough to pull her attention away from her inner diatribe. She blinked at her friend gratefully.
“We all know Riasli is pulling her evil nemesis shit, and that’s okay. You’re okay. We’re all okay. Just wish we had some wind elements and not just useless arrows.” Merlin smiled, taking a deep breath after finishing his speech.
“Actually.” Rashlyn stepped forward. “I have a Windcut kick, and a Burst of Air punch. They cost me a chunk of energy, and I only just got them, but we can definitely use them.”
“I have one acid attack I can use. It’s usually a diversion, but...” Jinna shrugged.
“Different strokes for very different encounters, it seems.” Merlin smiled and briefly spared a glare at Havoc. “Sometimes we need to adapt.”
“Why is it just waiting?” Devlish muttered, never taking his eyes from the mob. “I mean, usually the attack radius is huge, and we have to engage, but she’s just waiting there.”
“Maybe she’s seeing if we’re going to give up, in which case they don’t need to fight. Maybe she just has a really sportsmanlike personality.” Sinister offered without much conviction. “I’m not sure how I’m going to heal on this. I can pull life, but life healing isn’t quite as strong as blood. Just the way it is.”
