LIGHTNOVELONLINE Chapter 5: Respawn
Error! Corpse cannot be removed from dungeon as initial location was inside of dungeon.
Solution: Corpse returns to initial location inside of dungeon.
Error! Corpse cannot be returned to initial location as initial location is safe room and corpses cannot be placed inside of safe rooms!
Solution: Corpses will be revived inside of safe room.
I woke up last. The others are here too. We're back in the break room. Nat is curled up on the floor, holding her knees and crying. Brian is cursing up a storm. Theo is praying to Jesus. Jose is at a vending machine getting more snacks.
We're all alive? Weren't we all killed? Our clothes sure look like we got killed. Nat's shirt front is torn open and her red shirt and khaki pants are soaked with blood. Jose's shirt back is torn to ribbons. Theo's shirt is on the floor. I think he ripped it off. Brian's left pant leg is coated in dark red blood. I look down and see that my shirt sleeves are covered in blood and some yellow goo. Ear wax? I'm going to tell myself it's ear wax.
We thought we were all heroes. We thought we were warriors in a game who would emerge triumphant. We were wrong. I was wrong.
Three of us are regular people on the top floor of a dungeon. Those three probably couldn't even take on the 1st floor of the dungeon. Letting them get involved at all pulled Jose and I down. This was my mistake. Again. Again I got people killed.
We take some time. We don't do anything for a while. I spend some time in my menus, then try an experiment.
“Jesus, Jun, would you stop that?” Nat snaps at me.
“No,” I say flatly. “I'm raising my proficiency.” I cast Dark Mote yet again. I can cast it once every two minutes, based on my Arcana Point regeneration rate. I'm up to 38% proficiency. I haven't noticed a difference yet but it goes up by 1 every time I cast it. Maybe something happens when it hits 100%.
Preparation and training are what keep you alive. I forgot that. If I prepare and train these new powers, I can get back. Back to being an unstoppable Ranger.
“Well, go around the corner and do it.” Nat motions towards the long, curving east side of the break room.
I shrug and head that way. We never went all the way around the corner so I might as well explore. I walk the room. It's about 300 feet long. Towards the end things change. There's copies of the employee fridge and shelves with twisted microwaves that are probably unsafe to use. I check the fridge copies and find each one has a replica of my can of Rockstar lemonade. I pop one open and feel the citrus and caffeine take hold of me.
I died. I died to a fucking parrot. After everything I went through in Afghanistan, a goddamn parrot got me? Fuck that shit.
At the end of the long room is the glow of the break room TV. It's still on?
“Holy shit,” I say to myself. Then I yell, “Guys the TV works!” They come running and we stand there watching the news.
The dungeons are everywhere. Some people have made it out of their dungeons. Seems like people who started in the dungeon stay there when they die. But people who enter the dungeon, when they die (the first responders who went in) their bodies get rejected. Their corpses get unceremoniously slid out the front door of the dungeon.
“They'll have to deploy a SWAT team to get us out.” Theo says.
Brian finishes off his Gatorade. “Yeah but at least we won't starve until they get their shit together.”
Nat, miss pessimist, says “They don't know we're up here. They might not come at all.”
“Or if they do,” Theo says, “it might not be for a while. I doubt that a Get! store in the suburbs north of Dallas is very high on their list right now.”
They're all quiet again. The news continues. Jose looks at me, and I nod to him. We head back.
The others don't notice we're gone, or if they do they don't think anything is up. That's fine.
"We should go," I say to him.
"You finally going to take this seriously?" he asks me.
"Yeah. Yeah, I need to get a bit more serious."
Jose and I head to the door. We've been leaving it open since the monsters can't enter anyway. I cast Fire Bat and hand the weapon over to Jose. I grab one of Nat's shivs, arming myself. A knife, or the closest thing to it. Though improvised, it feels better in my hand then the bat does.
Jose swings the bat a few times. He's plenty strong and has amazing Reflexes, but he was never one for up close combat. He swings a few more times, looking less like a batter and more like a swordsman. "Just like Skyward Sword," he says. I'll trust that means something to him.
We head out. We've tried being just Get! employees, tried being just nerds. But that's not going to be enough. We need our true strength. We need to go back to our time in the Army, where split second timing killed your enemies and saved your life.
It's time to be Rangers again.
-----
We're now at the entry into the large pet supplies area. We can see the remains of the fight. Blood. A lot of dried blood. Where Nat killed that dog is a small pile of Sacagaweas. The bird is still on the ground, its wing broken. Ha, suck it, shit head.
“I think the bodies must disappear after a while” I whisper to Jose. He nods in agreement.
We're crouched by the wall and he pops up once, then comes back. “Should have gone without them the first time, ” he says.
The hallway here is about 10 feet wide. Perfectly defensible with two. “I'm faster, I'll be bait,” I say.
I cast Dark Mote three times and then dash out into the room. On cue the animals attack. The four bobcats leap up onto their cat tree perches again, then leap down. I turn back and see the remaining dog has dashed in behind me and is growling. I take off in its direction, shiv in hand, held in front of me.
The dog goes low and aims a snap at my shin. I respond with a drop kick to its face. The head snaps back. I continue forward but rake my shiv along its side as I go. I'm close enough now so the Dark Motes swirl and shoot into the dog. Two in its back, one into its ear. The one in the ear hurts it bad. It winces and howls and rubs a paw at the left side of its head. I keep running.
I pass Jose and skid to a stop, then turn, shiv first and step next to him. The four bobcats swarm in. Jose takes wide, low swings to mostly keep them back but he clobbers one in the process and the fire part of the fire bat ignites the cat. It screeches a horrible cry as it catches fire and runs away. When he connects solidly with one of the cats I jump in with the shiv, bury it deep into the cat's neck, then fall back. Now there's two cats and we each take one.
I crouch and hold my shiv underhand. Jose takes the opportunity to wind back for a full baseball swing. Both cats leap at once. I push the glass shard into my bobcat's eye. Jose's swing sends his cat flying back and to the left. With my other hand I press the shiv further and further into the bobcat's head until a grey goo spurts out of the wound. It twitches, then stops moving.
The flaming cat is running around in circles. The light from the feline torch casts odd shadows through the cages in the room. It looks like grids of shadow are dancing across the walls and ceiling. The dog I cut open whines as it falls down and bleeds to death.
Jose starts to step into the room but I hold him back. I then take a breath and dash over to the flopping parrot. “Die human die!” it says as I punt it, flinging it into the wall with a sickening crack.
“It killed me with a sonic attack,” I say, and Jose nods in acceptance. The flaming cat has slowed and Jose walks over and brings down the bat to finish off the last of the bobcats.
The room is quiet except for the sound of burning cat. The smell in here is horrendous. Burnt hair, blood, gore, animal shit, greasy dog food and lavender kitty litter all swirl into a potent smell that I wouldn't wish on anyone.
We poke and prod the dead until they fade away and drop their loot. We get another dog tooth short sword, clawed brass knuckles that look like cat claws, 12 dollars in coins and a human sized eye patch from the parrot.
The eye patch is made of black silk with a soft leather strap. I try it on, placing it over my right eye. It doesn't seem to do anything for a second, then my menu appears in the darkened right side of my vision. At the top of the menu, above Level Up (oh I leveled up!) is a new option,
Open Patch
I use the new option and my vision clears, as if I wasn't wearing the patch. In the bottom right of my vision is a menu option, Close Patch.
I select it and my vision darkens again but my menu pops up immediately. “Hey this is pretty neat, lets you see through it or not, and when you're not looking through it you can access your menu.”
Jose just shrugs. “Let me know if it helps you hit with your dumb black dots.”
“Hey my Dark Motes actually helped in that fight!”
He shakes his head. He's pretty much right. Their unpredictable accuracy makes them unreliable.
We look around the room, inspecting the dog cages (mostly full of piss and shit), the cat litter boxes (also full of piss and shit) and finally the kitty litter ziggurat. I climb it and at the top is a cat bed with a collar in it. I toss it to Jose.
“It's... Pink.” He turns the collar over in his hands. It has a tag attached that says Princess Donut. He tries it on as a choker (too small), then a bracelet. “Doesn't seem to do anything.”
I shrug. “Wanna take apart a kitty litter ziggurat and see if there's treasure inside?”
He shrugs back and we start moving the heavy boxes of clay dust. About 5 minutes later we've successfully built a rampart in front of the hallway from which we could throw crap at any monsters that might approach the break room again.
Alright so mostly we built it for fun, but can you blame us? We never get to build forts at work. And there's so many things we could build forts out of!
In the center of the ziggurat is indeed a treasure. It's a mundane spiked dog collar. Jose takes the 2 inch spikes out (there's over 100 of them) and is practicing throwing them like darts.
Suddenly we hear the others shout at us from behind the litter wall. “Hey, you guys dead?” Theo calls out.
Jose calls back, “Naw.”
“We came back for round 2 and wiped everything out,” I say.
Nat says “Bullshit,” and peeks her head over the wall. “Where'd they go?”
“Killed ‘em.” comes Jose's reply. He hops up the wall. “Oh. This makes jumping really easy,” he says, pointing at his new pink bracelet. He then leaps about 10 feet forward off the rampart. It's impressive.
“You guys should stay there and let us go forward,” I say. “We have military training. We're ready for this.” I slide the cat claw knuckles over my right hand fingers and grip the dog tooth short sword with my left. I should be fine now. I take a few swings and swipes to get a feel for the weight of each.
“So what, we're just in your way?” Brian asks from behind the litter.
I don't want to say it. But it's true. I tried to give them a chance. Tried to hang back and let our tabletop role playing game nerd group find success in real fights against real monsters. But that was the wrong move. It got us all killed.
Jose and I met in the army. We met during the end days of the US's Afghanistan misadventure. Spent 9 months in near constant fighting in close quarters as we tried to eradicate “bad guys” in tunnels. It was a bad time. It basically made me emotionless. But I can fight like a mother fucker now, so... That's something.
“Yeah, you guys suck.” I say it without sugar coating it in the least. “I have combat experience out the ass. We both do. So you guys hold up there, and we'll go clear a path.”
“I guess we're pathfinders,” Jose says, referencing our RPG system of choice.
The others start yelling at us. We head to the far side of the room where I saw a door earlier. Nat climbs on top of the rampart and yells for us to stop. We don't. Theo asks us to stay. We don't. Brian yells “your funeral” at us. I don't even look back.
We don't stop because Jose and I played Rangers in real life, not in the game. We're US Army Rangers. And we don't stop for anything.