Dungeon Dalliance Read online

  Not good.

  Something washed over me and I felt a calm settling over my body. A moment later dancing sparks of light moved up and down and I got the feeling that everything was going to be okay.

  I also felt like a total fucking idiot looking down at the healing light dancing up and down my body. I could totally heal myself, but it hadn’t occurred to me because I’d been in shock looking at the unpleasant sight of my body getting ripped open.

  I looked up to see Sefia and Keli making their way carefully through the crystals. Sefia looked like she’d rather be anywhere than among those things, and after seeing what they did to Pig God I was inclined to agree with her.

  “You’re okay?” she asked, looking me over.

  I glanced down to the spot where my wounds had been healed up. Though the spell hadn’t fixed up my robes. Something told me I was going to have to go somewhere in town to get those fixed up.

  “I think I’m okay,” I said. “Definitely better than the other guy.”

  That didn’t stop her from looking me up and down. She ran her hands over me, and I did like her method of making sure everything was working correctly even if it was a little embarrassing to have her doing it right in front of Keli.

  Then again from the way Keli was looking at us and I definitely got the sensation of interest from her, but at the same time I wasn’t entirely sure considering she was a player and not an NPC. I wasn’t getting as clear a reading from her as I did from Sefia.

  Which probably should’ve been a relief if it meant humans were harder to read than NPCs. I wouldn’t want someone else with my weird abilities to go rummaging through my mind, for instance.

  I glanced at Treanna who was looking at me with something that approached actual worry. Now there was something new.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “And no, I can’t tell you how it works. These are all things you have to figure out for yourself.”

  “Fat lot of help you are,” I muttered.

  I only realized the mistake I’d made when Sefia pinched me as she ran her hands down along my leg. I looked down at her with a few choice words in mind, then realized what that must’ve sounded like to her.

  “I wasn’t talking about you,” I said. “My spirit is being bad.”

  “I know,” Sefia said. “I can see and hear her now, remember? I was pinching you because you need to be more respectful of your spirit.”

  Treanna did a couple of twirls in the air. Twirls that distracted me because they gave me a view right up that very short skirt that barely covered what the art department gave her. When she came back around she stuck her tongue out at me, clearly wanting to drive the point home.

  “That’s right,” she said. “You should listen to Sefia. I always liked her.”

  Sefia smiled at Treanna as she moved back up, and I was suddenly confronted with the awkward situation of my trainer turned party member and maybe something more than that grinning at me and cupping my cock as she moved her way back up. Her hand only lingered there for a moment, but it was long enough that it got my attention.

  I was suddenly in a mood to have a little bit of fun with her, and the only thing that stopped me was the sure knowledge that Keli wouldn’t appreciate what I had in mind. That and those crystals didn’t look like the best thing to have a roll around on, for that matter.

  “Everything seems to be in one piece now,” Sefia said. “Though you would do well to remember that you have the ability to heal yourself the next time you find yourself in a predicament like that.”

  I looked down to the tear in my robes where some of my innards had been sticking out just moments ago. That wasn’t a pleasant memory. We’re talking the sort of experience that’d probably be good for a touch of PTSD, and I found myself wondering exactly how the game designers were going to deal with something like that.

  Then again, if they could rummage around in my head then it stood to reason they might also be able to do something about things like PTSD. Either way I pushed those thoughts away and walked over to Pig God.

  “So I guess this works like everything else in the game?” I asked.

  “Sure does,” Treanna said.

  I looked up at her and she shrugged. “What? It’s not like I’m giving away game secrets or anything. You touch the dead monster and you get whats inside it. Looting mechanics have worked like that for decades.”

  I touched Pig God and an inventory screen came up showing me all the lovely goodies it had buried inside it. Some gold, a couple of jewels, and at least one item that looked like it would be useful for each of the three of us who so nobly defeated Pig God by running it into a bunch of crystals that did the work for us.

  I wasn’t complaining if I got credit for the kill though. A kill was a kill and XP was XP. If the game was going to try and fuck us over with its mechanics then I wasn’t going to complain when we got the chance to turn around and fuck the game right back by exploiting some of those mechanics.

  “Looks like we have a Battlemage robe that’ll come in handy for Keli,” I said, passing it to her. The thing actually appeared in my hand rather than going back and forth in a trade window like in older massive online games. “We have a circlet that gives a plus to Holy offensive spells which will be great for you Sefia.”

  And then I came to the last bit. I guess it didn’t matter that my robes had been torn, because there was a new set of robes in there that looked like they were tailor made for me what with the way they increased Mental Fortitude, which was something I needed both to be able to use some of my Psionic abilities as well as resisting other people who might try to use their own Psionic abilities against me.

  I equipped the robes and looked down. They were a deep purple that looked pretty good if I said so myself.

  “Nice look,” Keli said.

  “Why thank you,” I said, doing a spin and checking out my new duds. “I have to say they look quite nice, if I do say so myself.”

  “Oh yeah,” Treanna said, giving me a considering look. “That’s almost enough to make me want to go full size and jump your bones.”

  I blinked. “You can do that?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” she said with a wink.

  “We need to get out of here,” Sefia said, glancing around and looking more and more nervous with every passing moment.

  Oddly enough she mostly seemed nervous because of what was in front of us and not because of what was behind us. The boars were still looking pretty intimidating to me, but I figured there had to be something dangerous about this place if it was creeping out the one woman in our party who knew a little something about this place and why we should be cautious around here.

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  “It’s the entrance to the local Crystalia Cave,” Keli said.

  “Which is?”

  “Big dungeon that’s infesting the forest around here and the main quest node. They’re all over the game world, and people have been trying to finish one of these since the game went live.”

  “Trying to?” I asked.

  “Well yeah. There are things inside the caves that don’t take kindly to people going in there and trying to kill them. They say there’s a boss deep in each one that isn’t fun to take on in combat.”

  “Sounds like a good time,” I said.

  “You won’t think it’s a good time when they destroy your very soul,” Sefia said, making an odd sign in front of her chest that I assumed was the local religious equivalent of warding off bad spirits.

  Not that I was all that worried about bad spirits. Not when I knew everything in this game was something that’d been put there by a game designer. Which meant if there were bad spirits guarding the dungeons then there was a way to take them out.

  Game devs wouldn’t put something in a game that couldn’t be killed. If it was coded then I could kill it. At least I could with a little help from my friends, considering my class wasn’t all that great at actually taking
anything out on its own.

  Thems were the breaks though. And right now I wanted to get a little closer to this dungeon and see what there was to see.

  “I think we should check it out,” I said. “You can stay back here if you want to, Sefia, but I want to see what this place is like firsthand.”

  Plus Tommy aka Tomas had mentioned something about this place, and Madison had a few snarky words for him when he talked about it. I figured anything he was trying to defeat was something I wanted to check out and see if I could take care of it first.

  I didn’t think it was likely considering my low level and my inopportune class choice, but this game seemed to operate on a mix of realism and math, so I figured why not give it a try?

  4

  Dungeon Entrance

  “Look, all I’m saying is no one is forcing you to come along,” I said, feeling a little irritated.

  Sure it was difficult to be too irritated with Sefia. She was the hot trainer who’d been nice enough to give me the only relief I’d had in the past couple of years, but at the same time it was hard not to be a little irritated with her considering all the moping around she was doing as we got closer to the dungeon entrance.

  “I’m not being forced to come to this place,” she said, the bar over her head indicating our social link going down just a bit with her irritation. “All I’m saying is there are better things we could be doing with our time than chasing down a Crystal Guardian.”

  “Crystal Guardian sounds really fucking interesting,” I said.

  “Tell me about it,” Keli said. “Also sounds hard to kill. Especially for a couple of low levels like us.”

  “Low what?” Sefia asked, scrunching up her face in confusion.

  “We aren’t as versed in our professions as some of the other travelers who have joined your world recently,” I said, trying to translate game mechanics into terms she might understand.

  “Ah, I see,” she said. “There are some travelers who have become quite powerful in the time you’ve been in our world. Others, not as much.”

  She looked at me as she said that. Oh yeah, she was really irritated that we were heading for the dungeon, and she was taking it out on me. I sighed. I never thought I’d have this kind of complication in a game world, and with an AI no less. I reminded myself that she wasn’t even a real person for all that she looked, acted, and felt like it.

  There was a mental rabbit hole I wasn’t going down though. She might be an AI, but she was one of the most impressive and realistic bits of AI I’d ever seen. One of the hottest, too. It was hard to stay mad at her when I was constantly distracted by her curves in those skin tight robes!

  “This is all going to end in tears,” she muttered.

  I was about to open my big mouth and do something stupid like invite her to go and stay somewhere on the edge of the Crystal Corruption, that’s what she called the weird crystallized zerg creep that was taking over the forest, but at that moment we saw something ahead of us that made us all stop.

  It took my breath away. I was expecting maybe the entrance to a dank cave or something. Basically the kind of thing you’d see at the opening to most mines and caves in a video game like this.

  What I saw ahead of us was nothing like any of that though. It looked like something straight out of ancient Rome, but it was made out of pure quartz crystal that was clear as… Well as clear as crystal.

  It gleamed in the sunlight. It took in the sunlight and sent it back out in little rainbows. It multiplied the sun and made it blinding. I took a step forward, not bothering to listen to Sefia or her mutterings about how this was all going to end in tears, because…

  No, there was something wrong about this. Something wrong about the way the sun was multiplying in that crystal facade that led into an inky darkness that was blacker than any black I’d ever seen. The dungeon entrance shouldn’t have been that dark with all the light being thrown around, but…

  Something rumbled underfoot. I looked down, not quite sure what the hell was going on, and something erupted out of the ground.

  I took a couple of steps back as I tried to figure out exactly what the hell I was looking at. The thing was monstrous, because of course it was monstrous. It was a fucking monster in a video game. Monster was sort of right there on the tin, and this thing was sniffling around and looking like it was in the business of looking for something to fuck up.

  It looked like Pig God, only it was a little larger, and it was made entirely out of that blinding crystal. A blinding light pulsed from within, and it brought to mind the light I’d seen right before Pig God got blasted.

  Right. Because of course the thing would have its own scary magical light pulsing from deep inside it. That’s what happened with magical creatures that were looking around for some heads to bust, in a virtual reality sense.

  “Damn,” Keli breathed. “That thing is really fucking impressive.”

  It turned to her, still sniffing the air. It was a little odd seeing something made out of solid crystal sniffing at the air. Typically one didn’t expect to see rock moving around like that or seeming so alive, but if ever there was a time and a place for something like that to exist it would be in a video game where the constraints of reality didn’t matter.

  The thing let out a low growl. A growl that really sounded more like a squeal, but it was low enough and close enough to a growl that I figured I could round it up to a growl.

  “I think this is what Sefia was warning us about,” I said. “And I think we’re in trouble.”

  We were in the middle of one of those moments that happened to just about everyone who’d ever played an MMO. One of those moments where you get a little too close to a foe that’s obviously beyond you. A moment when you know that no matter what you do, you’re going to get fucked over because you’ve wandered into territory that’s far too high a level for you to have a prayer of getting away from the thing threatening to end you.

  I was getting that feeling now, and thinking about how painful it’d been getting gored in the ass by a bunch of wild boars, and how painful it’d been falling on the crystals when there were a few sparse outcroppings of the thing sticking up out of the ground at the edge of the Crystal Corruption.

  The thought of having boar tusks gouging my ass with those sharp crystals wasn’t exactly a flavor combination I was looking forward to. Fuck.

  “This is going to really fucking hurt!” I said.

  “I think you’re right!” Keli replied.

  “And I think I told you so!” Sefia said. “Honestly. What made you think that coming to the big scary monster in the middle of the Crystal Corruption would ever…”

  I ducked under the boar as it raised its snout to the side and swept it through the air over me. Something appeared next to the boar announcing that it’d just missed me with a tusk swipe.

  “Ha!” I shouted. “You’re gonna have to be faster than that if you want to…”

  Whatever taunt had been about to pass my lips died there as the thing came back for the second part of the swing. It sent me flying, and I had a view of something coming up to meet me. Crystals that seemed like they would be even more painful now that I was hitting them at high speed than they were when I hit them running as fast as my legs could carry me.

  My legs couldn’t carry me as fast as this boar could hit. I hit myself with a heal over time, instant cast bitches, and prayed it’d be enough to prevent some of the damage that was coming my way.

  It was, but only just. My health bar went down to about twenty percent from the combination of damage from the boar and the damage the crystals caused when their sharp bits stabbed into my soft and pliable flesh.

  “Fucking ouch!” I shouted.

  Definitely not a pleasurable sensation. I rolled around and hit the thing with a stun, then a mez. Unfortunately Keli was right behind the thing with her summoned sword at her side, and she swiped at the boar even as I landed the mez.

  I never got to find out if it
landed since the sword swipe would’ve broken it even if it did hit.

  “Damn it!” I shouted.

  Something else odd happened. I sensed a strange pulsing in time with the stun I set off. Both from within the boar, and from within the crystals all around it. It squealed in pain, and I didn’t think it was from Keli slamming her sword into the thing.

  It’s not like she was doing much damage if the tiny slivers of crystal she was taking off the thing’s hide were anything to go on.

  No, I’d caused that pain. I wasn’t sure how, but it had something to do with the stun spell. The same as it had when we’d fought the original version of Pig God. Now that was an interesting development. Something I could use, maybe, to fight this motherfucker!

  “Oh my God! Look at the fucking noobs trying to take on that crystalfiend!” someone shouted from behind me.

  That pulled my attention away from the crystal Pig Gd and to two players who were making their way up to the dungeon entrance. Thankfully neither one of them appeared to be Tommy.

  I got the feeling that asshole would do his best to kill my ass the moment he saw me. The fact that I was in the middle of a fight I couldn’t win against a monster that was way more powerful than anything my small group should be taking on wouldn’t help matters. The jerk probably wouldn’t even have to do anything to kill my ass.

  No, he’d just have to sit back and watch and laugh while the game did the killing for him.

  “Hey noob!” one of them, he looked like a mage of some sort, shouted. “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to take on stuff that’s higher than what you can handle! That thing’s deep purple for you!”

  I glowered at them. Neither one of them was offering to help, but then again it’s not like I’d want their help even if they were offering.

  Besides, why should they care? It was the law of the MMO jungle. They were high enough level to go into this cave, after all. Why did they care what happened to some lowly noobs who were in over their heads?