Underpowered Howard: A LitRPG Adventure Page 5

  I dropped that one and pulled another. This one also came up tails. I kept pulling, each time trying for heads, and in ten pulls got six heads and four tails.

  What I’d done to the giant was technically an exploit, from Mythian’s perspective, though I personally think it shouldn’t have been.

  The definition of “exploit” varied depending on who you talked to. Someone pure as the driven snow sees the world as a minefield of potential infractions. Ask an old-timer and the story’s more nuanced.

  Everlife’s developers, in my opinion, were lazy and underpaid. With something like a hundred different retirement worlds to maintain, and new ones coming online every year, they didn’t have the budget or inclination to figure out every possible way someone could break the game. Their solution was the karma system. Mythian itself—not careful game design—would keep players honest. The karma system saw all use of abilities, items, or events outside the developer’s “explicit invariant” as an exploit. Cleverness was not a defense, nor ignorance, nor good intentions, and Mythian was a hangin’ judge.

  The explicit invariant around the Return spell was obvious: It existed to save me a long walk to my corpse, and at a prohibitive price. It was not designed to shoot me up eight levels like a rocket. It was not designed to turn one-shot dying into a winning strategy against a monster many times my level.

  Though Mythian hated cheats, it nevertheless applied its penalties slowly. Using my coin-toss method—yet another exploit, because karma was supposed to be hidden—I could measure how far I’d fallen. This allowed me to comfortably cheat Mythian for ten hours straight, giant after giant, until there were none left in all the Grumbling Hills. By the time I was done, my roughly fifty-fifty ratio of heads-to-tails was now forty-sixty in a hundred toss test.

  Luck was against me now, though not severely. I’d earned a miraculous seventy-four levels today with hardly any work, but I couldn’t keep doing it. Not unless I wanted to be hit by another whale flung from a hurricane thousands of miles away. In other words: It was time to begin acting more like a necromancer and less like a twinked-out warrior.

  I used another skill point and purchased my next spell:

  Summon Wraith

  Attunement: 0/100

  Rate of Decay: 200

  Rate of Decay (PVP): 20

  Death Blossom: 100

  Death Blossom (PVP): 200

  Base Damage: 500 + 1% per attunement

  Air Speed: Fast

  Attack Cooldown: 20 seconds

  Description: Raise a quick-striking, non-trivial being from the dead to serve your nefarious ends. Unlike zombies and skeletons, wraiths can fly and pass through solid objects. In battle, they slash with phantasmic claws, spreading claws-tro-phobia in the hearts of all enemies.

  Wraiths aren’t smart, so choose your commands carefully. Silent commands work so long as you stay in voice range. Lastly, and never forget, when dealing with infernal creatures of darkness who want to devour your soul, keep it fun!

  Fine Print:

  1) Corpses not created by the necromancer may be raised, but cost 200 ROD, regardless of origin, 50% of which is paid immediately.

  2) Corpse storage is allowed but limited to player corpses only.

  3) Non-PVP-derived armies are limited to 100 or fewer. PVP-derived armies may be any size the necromancer can assemble.

  With a Rate of Decay, or ROD, of 200 to maintain non-PVP wraiths, I’d lose 200 vitality an hour, so all my stat points went to vitality. This brought it to 371 before gear bonuses. To keep from abusing Return, I buried my Soldier’s bracelet there in the hills, which removed my access to the warrior class and refunded the class point and skill point I’d spent. From now on, I’d rely solely on my necro skills.

  I still kept the sword because of the vitality, even though it was far less useful without the bracelet. Non-melee classes could use swords, but suffered a seventy percent damage penalty after player-level 10. Mythian’s way of saying, “Commit, already.” And Mythian was right. Sword kills wouldn’t trigger Death Blossom, which siphoned vitality from kills. Without Death Blossom, I couldn’t form a Necrotic Aura to protect me from physical attacks.

  I had to wait two hours for my next move, and lamented that Darcy’s healing potions only restored health, not vitality.

  After regenerating 25 points, I unloaded Ryan’s corpse from my bottomless bag and summoned a wraith for 20 vit an hour. With my regen at ten percent an hour, I could have eventually raised two additional wraiths with no problem—or three, if I didn’t mind hunting non-trivial monsters to build a vitality surplus. “Vamping up,” as it was called. But only player corpses allowed for the 20-ROD wraiths, and that would take time.

  It had been years since I’d seen a wraith. They all looked the same: a shadowy presence with tattered black wings, jagged claws, and glowing nightmare eyes. Scary-looking didn’t do them justice. Mythian had a tap on every player’s goosebump muscles and knew how to make things frightening if it wanted to.

  The wraith sighed whenever I looked at it—a barely whispered word I felt more than heard: Death…

  Finished with giants, I took to the air and headed northwest in the direction of the Doomshackle Mountains. Like most places in Mythian, the fantasy-sounding name hinted at the encounters and dungeons I’d find there. In this case, a subterranean underworld of tunnels hundreds of miles long, supposedly dug by slaves of an ancient race called the “taliathe.” The deeper one went, the worse the encounters. Many were tougher than the hill giants, and a few as bad or worse than the kraken guarding the bridge to Ward 2.

  Two days later, after flying nonstop from the Grumbling Hills, I made camp and set myself to sleep for eight hours rather than risk missing the entrance to the Timeless Tourney in the dark. Being a newly minted character, the Maps tab of my character sheet was gray, so I was relying on memory alone.

  Morning came with two surprises. First, my wraith was gone—killed by someone named “Jane,” according to my logs. If I’d met any Janes over the years, I couldn’t remember.

  The second thing was more disturbing: Just beyond my cold campfire, a large number of gold coins littered the ground beneath where my wraith had been.

  I gazed around warily. “Hello? Anyone there?”

  No reply.

  I got up, collected the coins by sweeping my coin purse a few inches over them, then gasped at the count in my game log.

  GOLD ADDED: 110

  This was the exact number I’d pulled and dropped from my purse during my two karma tests.

  “All right, who’s screwing with me?” I said to the empty clearing.

  Maybe whoever it was hated littering so much they’d killed my wraith and dumped my gold here to prove it. Maybe they wanted me to know they could have killed me easily while I slept and were toying with me.

  “But why?” I said.

  I quickly disregarded those bandits sending an assassin after me. They would have needed someone who could track through the air. With resources like that, they wouldn’t have been out robbing people.

  It was possible someone held a grudge against me from way back when. Some bitter ex-guildy. Most of them were now gone—dead by Hard Mode, killed by the Domination, or asleep forever in the Hall of Heroes after turning off their wake timers.

  “Maybe they’re just nuts,” I whispered.

  Insanity was possible in Mythian, just like real life. Immortality, torture, and even boredom could twist you up inside and drive you bananas. I’d met sadists who got off on torturing lucids, knowing they couldn’t Give Up like real players. Whenever I found those types, I made sure to dish it right back—force them to Give Up and start again at level 0. At least that way they wouldn’t be able to torture anything for a while.

  Some crazies were strange, though. Take Joe Volcano, for instance. Claimed to have leveled to 20 not by killing but by doing repeatable fetch quests for lucids in the city. At any given time, you could find him in Ward 1, still level 20, walking west from a
popular binding stone toward a massive volcano. Every time he scaled it, he’d throw himself into the boiling magma, killing himself. As far as anyone knew, he’d been doing it for hundreds of years—maybe even thousands. Meeting Joe Volcano had turned into a pilgrimage for some people, myself included. When we finally met, I’d asked him why he kept doing it.

  “I’m setting an unbreakable record,” he’d said with a slight smile on his face.

  So it was perfectly conceivable I’d attracted a lunatic who, rather than murder me in my sleep, thought it was fun to stalk me for hundreds of miles to return lost change.

  But was it likely? Crazies existed, sure, but they were rare. Fewer still were like Joe Volcano. This thing with the coins… It was methodical. Tracking me through the air required power, and power and restraint went hand in hand. Most of the lunatics I’d run into were impulsive.

  Still musing, I restarted the fire, made coffee, then sipped it quietly while staring at the mountains I hoped to reach later that afternoon.

  Chapter Five

  Accompanied by another bandit wraith—the woman this time—I descended into a narrow valley shrouded in impenetrable mist and landed on a ridge of stone overlooking a trickling stream. A check of my local map showed that, sure enough, the valley perimeter matched the somewhat trapezoid shape I recalled from my tour of the necro class ten years ago, and my visit as a warrior-thief two hundred before that. Nothing had changed in the landscape: same gnarled trees and overgrown grass weighed down by dew that would never evaporate, waiting for sunlight that would never penetrate.

  I started walking uphill to where the mountains folded into each other, taking my time, keeping an eye out for whoever the hell Jane was. An hour later, the stream ended in a massive jumble of rock-cut posts and lintels like something from the neolithic age. Just beyond it, about five feet below the surface, a set of steps descended to a dark tunnel.

  The stone of the entryway was covered in ancient runes I recognized, but of course couldn’t decipher, not being a runemaster. Taliathe runes. This suggested the dungeon was fairly tough by Ward 1 standards, and best avoided by all but the most well-equipped adventurers.

  “Hey,” I said to my wraith. “Go in and check.”

  Without hesitation, the wraith flew down the steps and into the tunnel. A minute later, it came out. It was still at full health and I hadn’t gotten any experience points, so this part, at least, was free of monsters.

  With a last look around, I ducked under a toppled pillar and edged down the steps to land in ankle-deep water. Incredibly cold, but I’d live.

  The tunnel ahead of me wasn’t natural, but rather composed of cut stone sized for beings towering perhaps eight feet tall. This I gathered from the height of the light runes running along the walls. I reached out, brushing the closest, and the next five lit up.

  “Scout ahead five hundred feet and return,” I said, and the wraith zoomed forward.

  It returned no worse for wear, but that didn’t mean there weren’t pressure traps for me to step on. Now I wished I’d brought a staff and not a sword so I could tap the walls and floor as I went.

  “Or a skeleton,” I mused.

  A skeleton would rattle along tripping snares like a pro, but it would also alert anything I’d rather sneak up on.

  The wet floor ended at a wide crack I had to jump over. The going was drier and more comfortable after that. Weirdly, I felt safe—and then suddenly worried. Nothing was safe in Mythian, no matter how many health points you had.

  “And I can’t use Return,” I said.

  The instance I’d be attempting was the Timeless Tourney—a bench press for players. Anyone lower level than 100 who completed it received the title, “Dungeon Crawler.” If you died before it finished, you lost. You’d also lose twenty-five levels and any lootable gear you’d brought, due to the instance being sealed against repeat attempts for five years. The rewards, however, were worth the effort—especially for necromancers. For most players, though, the draw was the credit. Being a Dungeon Crawler could land a player in any Ward 1 guild of their choosing.

  It was a tough dungeon. Most people did it in a group, but necromancers didn’t run in groups. And we didn’t join guilds, either.

  “We,” I said, trying it on for size. It was the first time I’d thought of myself as a necromancer and not some other class, despite having played so many in the last fifteen years.

  “Weeeee!” I whispered and forged ahead.

  An hour later, the runelight abruptly ended and I cast Ghost Flame. For necros, it acted like a normal light, though others couldn’t see it. It also worked a little like a blacklight, revealing the living in dark conditions.

  Five minutes later, I pulled up short.

  “What the hell?”

  The section of tunnel ahead seemed a smidgeon brighter, and the air looked faintly distorted. There was a reason I’d been hesitant about this dungeon, and I hadn’t even reached the Tourney yet. The place was a warren for all manner of strange monsters.

  “Wraith One, fly ahead.”

  I forced myself to say Wraith One because that was its name and I needed to get used to issuing commands that way.

  The wraith flew into the distortion and all hell broke loose. At first, I didn’t know what was happening. It disappeared and the tunnel began contorting crazily like a funhouse mirror tripping on hallucinogenics. And the screeching! Like rats fighting in a cage. Wraiths didn’t screech. They hissed and moped around and that was it.

  When I realized what was going on, I reeled in disgust.

  “Shit sheet,” I said.

  That wasn’t the real name, but that’s what everyone called them. Dungeon drapers were massive, flappy insect things that hung from ceilings and used chameleon-like properties to replicate what they hid. They could also read minds a little. Frequently, they added elements to the display—treasure chests, scantily clad women, banquets of delicious food… Anything an adventurer might be swayed by.

  “Wraith One, retreat!” I shouted, but nothing happened.

  The draper had buttoned it up, killing it slowly. And just like that, I’d learned something new: Wraiths could pass through walls, but not flesh. Or at least not draper flesh.

  Unlike demons summoned by diabolists, necro minions had an attack cooldown of twenty seconds. Smart players, if they had the power, ran with six or more minions to alternate attacks and retreats.

  “No choice,” I said, and upended my bottomless bag. The mouth stretched wide to disgorge my last player corpse. When I saw hair, I cast Summon Wraith.

  “Attack!”

  My new wraith flew at the draper, slashing with its spectral claws for 500 damage. My first wraith came off its twenty-second attack cooldown and delivered a hit from inside before dying, bringing the total damage to 1000.

  “Back up,” I ordered, to keep the new one from being eaten. “Harrow!”

  A beam of dark energy shot from my hands to strike the translucent creature for 37 points a second.

  I kept it up for fifteen seconds, then stopped so my new minion would get the kill. Death Blossom for wraiths delivered 100 vitality, whereas Harrow only gave 50.

  The wraith’s second hit killed the draper for 485 points of overkill.

  I’d cut it way too close if I cared about building my Necrotic Aura. The aura instantiated with 100 points of vitality, or 1000 health, and formed a bubble of shadow around me. If no minions were up, or I didn’t kill anything within thirty minutes, it would vanish. This helped discourage players from artificially vamping up over the course of hours, days, and weeks, killing something repeatedly on respawn and building a tremendous, unstoppable aura. The other thing that helped discouraged such auras was the fact that they transmitted pain when hit. Any necro with the wherewithal to build a 500,000 health aura would go through hell when it came crashing down.

  “Wraith One, scout ahead!”

  This wraith had taken the name of the dead one without prompting, though I could change
it if I wanted to.

  Stepping carefully around the draper, I looked when I shouldn’t have. The creature—now fully opaque—appeared as a white mesh of tube worms woven tightly together. Though it was dead, some of the worms still moved. If I were a desperate adventurer, I might have cut it apart looking for hidden treasure.

  “Yuck,” I said, and kept going.

  I applied 10 skill points to Summon Wraith, which retroactively increased the health and damage of my shadowy minion by ten percent, letting it hit for 550 and giving it 550 total health points. Death Blossom, however, stayed the same.

  As much as I complained about Mythian’s design, I had to hand it to the developers: Minion math was fairly easy, once you got used to it.

  The way ahead had changed from stone blocks to a rough-hewn shaft cut into the living rock. The designers had added extra believability to the layering in that I could see gouges in the walls. The ground was uneven, and my boots caught easily in the pits and ridges left by those “ancient slaves” toiling with their picks.

  There were branching tunnels along the way. Some went right, others left, and still others straight up or down such that I’d have to fly to follow them. Though I wasn’t using the wall runes anymore, I could tell where to go by which race had cut them. Elven or dwarven runes led to their respective mines or long-abandoned enclaves. One set was carved deeply into the rock in the spidery scrawl of the taliathe.

  It was these I followed. In time, I found myself in the ruins of an ancient underground city named Hual’hofet. It was constructed around a massive cylinder that dropped thousands of feet into the roots of the mountain. Above and below me were terraces and bridges as far as my Ghost Flame could illuminate. The architecture held neither the delicate lines of the elves nor the thick weightiness of the dwarves. Rather, it was as if the space had been pushed and prodded into place by some gargantuan sculptor whose only job was to open it up. There were no statues or shimmering pools, nor anything that could be confused with art. Also, the city was dead—as in empty, at least of taliathe. If you asked Bernard, he’d spend hours telling you their history and how they’d mysteriously vanished eons ago.