Part 2 - Outside the Dungeon
Chapter 8
I had no interest in talking to my mom about the dungeon dive, but it still hurt that I couldn’t talk to her. She was busy tonight, pulling another shift at the hotel. I was by myself, home, weighing which flavor of freeze-dried ramen I felt like. My arm still hurt and the back of my neck felt like I was sunburned. Anytime I turned on my feed I could feel my skin burning.
I didn’t really feel like eating, but no matter how sad I got, I was always hungry. Some people were lucky that their body didn’t force them to eat all the time, but not me. Even when miserable, I wanted to eat.
I sighed and chose the Real Chicken-Like Flavor from the drawer. Breaking the bag and tossing its contents into a bowl filled with hot water, I waited for my meal to finish cooking. At Roosevelt, we had gotten some of the best food I had ever had. Elise said it wasn’t very good, but we had actually had fresh fruits and I was pretty sure none of it had been freeze-dried.
The closest my mom could ever afford a fresh fruit was that one time in eighth grade I had stolen an apple from Becca. I sighed, remembering the food at Roosevelt fondly, and mentally flipped on my feed.
Immediately, dozens of videos populated in front of my eyes, all paused, as an ad for makeup played. I patiently waited the time out while I stirred the ramen, and a tiny, miniscule fraction of a c-coin was deposited into my account for watching the ad.
With the ad over, I cycled through my feed. I was very behind on several major dives that happened while training at Roosevelt. It wasn’t that we didn’t have access to our feed while training, but I just didn’t have any time to focus on them. I had had a few vidcasts playing in the background, but I didn’t really like that sensation. I knew some people had trained and practiced while watching videos, but it typically made me feel nauseous. I just listened to casts and music, so I was aware of how the dives went, but I still wanted to actually see the highlights.
I found one highlight reel for the Chicago dive on the Lethality feed. It featured a party of four divers at the large LiveTicket Chicago Dungeon where they were taking part in a classic dungeon dive. The dive itself wasn’t overly interesting in regards to theme or story, pretty standard stuff, but I did want to see Nikki of the Knife teaming up with other divers. She normally did solo dives, and as a rogue, that meant she did a lot of sneaking and backstabbing. I wanted to see how she played as part of a team and what that gameplay looked like. Especially now that I’ve done a dive.
“Tonight we have a very special dive,” One of the announcers, Mike Field, began, “This will be Clint’s 50th dive, and he has been quickly climbing the ranks.”
“He may be a serious diver for the Severe dungeons if he keeps up this break-neck pace of leveling,” Anna Westrel, the other announcer, responded, “I remember his first Moderate dungeon was a bit over two years ago, in Cleveland.”
“One of the fastest progressions we’ve seen in Lethality with only a dozen or so divers who were faster,” Mike responded. Before the two announcers could finish, I highlighted their track and muted it.
I know most people really enjoyed the dive commentators, or at least never turned them off, but I couldn’t stand most of them. They were always talking over the dive and took you out of it. Some of them were past divers, others dungeon designers, and still others were just idiots they found on the side of the road. While their voices, now, were silent, the moment they mention a sponsor or do an ad, they’ll be back and I’ll have to mute them again. There was a package you could buy for auto-silenting feeds, but I couldn’t imagine wasting money on something like that.
I fast-forwarded through several fights, none too interesting. Seemed like the dungeon was mostly stocked with orcs and ogres, and the party was fighting them head on. Occasionally the feed would stop to highlight a sponsor, I was forced to watch the ad as I was only in the basic tier for Lethality’s feed, and then I’d skip forward again.
From watching bits and pieces, I could see that Nikki was against the idea of straight up fights, but Clint, the warrior in the group, wore full plate, emblazoned with countless logos and stickers from cereal to car insurance. It made it difficult for him to sneak about and kept loudly entering into rooms, not allowing Nikki to sneak ahead and ‘steal’ their points. The other two, both priests, didn’t really seem to care how they went about clearing the dungeon. Both were lower level and were probably just hoping to level one or two times while Nikki and Clint dealt with the monsters.
I got to the halfway point through the dungeon and I resumed normal speed while slurping my ramen. I was at the part I had heard so much about and I had worked hard to avoid as many spoilers as possible about it.
Nikki and Clint were arguing again about the next room. Nikki had detected a trap on the door, and she was telling Clint she’d only disarm it if he’d stay back for 30 seconds while she positioned herself correctly in the next room for their fight. They knew there were at least two ogres in there, probably more.
Clint did not like that idea and, quite loudly, was telling Nikki what to do. The two priests were looking a bit nervous between the two high level divers, obviously not wanting to take sides. Clint was a level 65 warrior with a knight specialization. Nikki was a level 67 rogue, specializing in backstabber with an assassin build. While Nikki had two levels on the warrior, I wasn’t sure if she could actually win in a head-on fight with the heavily armored diver without using some dirty tricks.
The argument between the two was growing in intensity when one of the priests, Ella, tried brokering a compromise between them. Ella was only a level 52 sol priest with a focus on light, which granted her greater control over healing and fire, and she had dumped Strength it seemed at every level with her 4 in it. Clint grabbed Ella by her leather armor and, in a fit of rage, threw the thin woman at the door. The priest smashed through the door, triggering a magic trap that shot arcs of crackling lightning at anyone opening the door. Nikki was screaming at Clint while the other priest had ran several feet in the opposite direction from the shouting divers. Clint didn’t pay attention to the others and walked into the room, drawing his magical longsword that looked like a red shard of fire.
The view cut into the dungeon room where Ella was laying on the ground a dozen feet from the door she had been thrown through, her health bar at only half. The words “STUNNED” appeared over Ella’s health and the camera panned to show a large room with half a dozen ogres in it. The ogres were, if I remembered the documentary I saw on their design, spliced from the last silverback apes before they went extinct and black rhinos. They had a strange, hunched over form and were covered in a thick hide with scraggly black hair covering it in patches. They typically fought with their single great horn they had in the center of their face, though they were quite slow and had difficulty seeing more than a few feet in front of them.
While the priest’s sudden arrival through the door had surprised the dumb monsters, they weren’t wholly unprepared. Many of them were holding weapons, though one was holding a maul upside down, grasping the head of it and using the shaft as an improvised spear. They quickly charged at Clint and Ella, swinging their weapons and giving out a ferocious roar as the system quickly flashed their basic stats on the screen.
Ogre // Level 30, Hit Points 413, Stamina 290, Mana 20, Base Attack 3:10+15
It was the same stats that most of the other ogres had, though they had already fought an ogre mage that had substantially more Mana but a lower base attack.
Clint easily blocked several back-to-back blows from the ogres with his cherry red shield, the feed clearly showing the logo for Coca-Cola emblazoned across the front of it as Clint knocked a hammer blow to the side. Unfortunately, with six ogres, Clint couldn’t focus on all of them at once, and Nikki and the other priest hadn’t joined the fight yet.
Two of the ogres ignored Clint and lumbered over to a stunned Ella, the debuff only had a few seconds left. I held my breath as one of the ogres raised their hammer and brought it slamming down on the priest’s chest, her health bar went almost completely dark red, the armor’s energy field keeping her chest from collapsing while she still had hit points. The other ogre was about to stomp down on the diver, when Nikki appeared in a blur of red hair and black armor, stabbing her signature dragon daggers into the ogre’s throat, delivering a devastating blow that dealt 237 damage to the ogre.
Unfortunately, she had the attention of both ogres so any future Backstabs were going to be difficult to get off. She clung to the ogre, stabbing over and over into its throat as it tried to pull her off, first grabbing her legs and pulling as hard as it could as Nikki plunged a knife into its shoulder and held on tightly to the blade. The harder the ogre pulled, the more it dragged Nikki’s blade deeper into its body, though it wasn’t all good for the rogue. While the ogre only had about a tenth of its health bar left, Nikki had also lost about a quarter of her hit points from the ogre’s immense strength crushing her legs and attempting to yank her off.
Nikki’s grip finally slipped due to arterial spray as the ogre gave one more tug, pulling the woman off of him and in front of its face. It gave a huge bellow and just as it was about to bite Nikki, the other ogre swung its hammer at the ogre’s fist holding Nikki. The ogre missed the attack with the hammer, and instead smashed the other one in the face, a horrific bone snapping sound came from the now-dead ogre, though I was pretty sure the dungeon had amplified the sound for the vidcasts. Nikki dropped to the ground with a cry as she landed weirdly on her ankle. Despite obvious pain, she stood protectively over the fallen priest while the remaining ogre lifted its hammer once again and brought it down. Nikki tried blocking the hammer blow, but she didn’t have both of her knives, one of them still lodged in the dead ogre’s shoulder bone, and the blow dropped Nikki to her knees, taking a chunk out of her health bar.
The stunned condition on the priest finally ended, and she gasped out a heal spell, touching Nikki, restoring the rogue’s health bar from half to two thirds of the way. Nikki didn’t respond as she pulled herself onto the ogre’s arm and expertly dashed up it, probably burning Stamina to maintain her balance and to move so quickly up the bulky appendage. She charged straight toward the ogre’s face, slamming her dagger hilt deep into the creature’s eye.
Howling in pain, the ogre wildly flung its arms and legs in a chaotic fashion, smashing into everything around it as it screamed in rage. It slammed an arm into Nikki, causing her to lose her balance and crash into the floor. Just as soon as Nikki hit the ground, she was back on her feet, reducing some of the damage by tumbling a few feet across the floor. In the wild flailing of the ogre, Nikki had lost her second knife. She pulled two small daggers from her greave sheathes, readying them for a follow-up strike when she froze.
In the mad and chaotic movements of the ogre, the ogre had stomped on top of Ella.
The vidcast paused, and a highlight reel rolled the feed back several seconds, and played another camera angle of what happened. It repeated Nikki stabbing the ogre in the eye, Nikki being knocked off, and the ogre slamming its feet into the ground as it wildly tried to fend off any more attacks. Its right foot came down on Ella’s chest, who hadn’t yet healed herself, crushing her into the ground. I watched as bone and blood sprayed out from under the ogre’s foot and a skull appeared over the priest’s head as the health bar went to black and then faded away.
That was it. Ella had died.
I paused the vidcast, rewound several seconds, played it again. And watched.
I was stunned. I had heard that the death was sudden and out of nowhere, that it was a noob mistake, but I hadn’t really believed it. Had the priest healed herself the armor’s energy field would’ve protected her from most of that. She’d have had a hell of a bruise, maybe a few cracked ribs.
The dungeon was rated Lethality High—which meant death could happen. It wasn’t often, but maybe once a year someone would die in the dungeons. Typically it was from multiple creatures, making dumb mistakes, or failing to properly disarm a particularly gruesome trap. There were higher ratings, Lethality Severe or Extreme, but only the top divers were active in those circuit. Nikki was still new to the Severe circuit, having only completed two dives. The top diver, Frederic of the Flame, only did Extreme dungeons now. He had out-leveled everything else at level 108.
I watched the scene again, and then let the vidcast continue and finish the fight. Nikki only let the diver’s death stop her for a breadth of a second before she charged the ogre again, this time flinging knife after knife at the ogre as she moved closer, pulling more from various sheaths secreted across her armor. She lodged a dozen knives into the creature’s arms, chest, and legs before pulling out two longer knives from boot sheathes and jumping. She slammed the knives into the creature’s chest and then used them as climbing tools, pulling herself up to the creature’s throat where she started stabbing them over and over, hoping to hit an artery with the blades. All the while, she was dodging the ogre attempting to desperately dislodge her.
Unfortunately for the ogre, it was unable to do much more than a few glancing blows to the rogue before it collapsed to the ground, dead. It laid next to the priest, both unmoving as Nikki retrieved several knives from its corpse and turned to see Clint taking down two ogres with quick hacks and slashes with his longsword.
During the time Nikki had killed two ogres, Clint had handled the other four ogres, barely taking any damage and cutting down three of the creatures. There was only one ogre left, but it barely lasted more than another ten seconds with Clint able to focus completely on the creature. With one last Stamina-powered strike, Clint cut through the creature’s arm and sliced open a portion of its chest, spilling its blood and viscera across the floor.
I fast-forwarded through the yelling match between Nikki and Clint. Nikki blaming Clint for Ella’s death and Clint blaming Nikki for not disabling the trap. Neither of them were paying attention to the other priest who had finally entered the room and was sitting down next to Ella’s body.
I watched as the two powerful divers finished their yelling, and then turned their attention over to the lone surviving priest, demanding healing before they carried on deeper into the dungeon.
I only half-watched the rest of the dungeon as nothing else of excitement happened. The final boss was an orc warlord who used an ogre as a mount, but Clint and Nikki dealt with it quickly and easily, the lone-surviving priest hanging very far behind them and not participating in most fights. He seemed a bit too shaken to focus on the dungeon itself.
Once the dive was over, I started flipping through a few others, but nothing had the same interest as the last one. There had a been a Moderate dive in the San Francisco Gate Dungeon featuring an underwater component, a High dive in the Euro-Turkey Dungeon that showed off a new monster, a spliced dog and lizard hybrid they were calling a goblin dog, and a Minor dive featuring new divers out of Indiana, one of them had gotten a bear companion.
I eventually got bored watching the dives and clicked off my feed, waiting for the commercial to end, before the screen in my eyes went dark and I realized I had left half of my ramen uneaten. I slurped the cold soup and tossed the empty plastic bowl in the sink where it bounced around a few times, clattering against the pile of other dirty dishes.
I’d clean them in the morning. Right now, I felt exhausted and defeated. I suppose hoping for distraction from my failed dungeon dive by watching more dives was a bit optimistic.
I walked up the creaking stairs and collapsed onto my bed, not bothering to change.