LIGHTNOVELONLINE Chapter 8: Timer
“I don't know if this place is like a tabletop RPG dungeon or a video game RPG dungeon,” I say as we finish our break.
“The difference?” Jose asks without taking his eyes off the big clothes dune.
“In tabletop, what we play, a dungeon is full of finite monsters. Like real life. Kill everything in a room and that room is cleared, forever. But in a video game monsters can respawn after a while. They come back to life or new ones are made.”
“You think it's the video game version?”
“Yeah, based on the menus, the fact that we respawned, how enemies are full of coins, etc. Hey, by the way, where are you putting all your Sacagaweas? My messenger bag is heavy with the dang things.”
Jose raises an eyebrow at me. “The inventory?”
“The... Inventory?”
“Menu option,” he says, like he's some friggin game to life master and I'm some noob.
I close my eyepatch, opening my menu and see, yes, an inventory option.
Inventory
Current Slots: 1
Items held: none
Sacagaweas: 47 on hand, 0 in storage.
Okay. I think about storing my coins. My bag lightens and my menu updates.
Sacagaweas: 0 on hand, 47 in storage.
“Well I'll be,” I say, opening the eyepatch to restore my vision. “You played with the storage yet?”
Jose nods, holds out his empty hand and the shoelace whip appears in it. Then a couple of pairs of shoes appear and 6 pop culture t-shirts from the clothes hills. Also, a dead snake. “I forgot about the snake,” he says. “That was a test. It worked.”
“What the crap? I only have one inventory slot!”
“It's based on Luck,” Jose says, picking up everything except for the snake, and I watch as the items disappear from his hands one by one. “My luck is 47 right now.”
My jaw drops. “My Luck is 1! What the frick, man!”
Jose shrugs and keeps collecting his dropped items. “Started with 27, put 20 of my free points into it.”
I do the math. “Wait, how many points do you get from your class?”
“Ten total. 2 Dexterity, 2 Reflexes, 1 Ki, 5 free points. First the free points went into Ki but at third level I got an ability.”
Jose stops talking as if that explained everything. “And the ability was?”
“A passive ability. A technique. Gives me back bullets to my clip based on Luck.”
“The full text, please?”
Jose closes his eyes and reads. “Bullet Refund Policy. Advanced. Passive. When you fire a ranged weapon there is a chance that a replacement round will immediately be loaded into your weapon. This chance is based on your Luck.”
“You don't have a gun.”
“But I will,” he says seriously. “I'm betting I can get one in the toy department.”
I think about that. The guns that fire foam darts are pretty popular items at the Get! and I could see them, or even real versions of them, being either enemy equipment or item drops.
“Jose Amarillo, you are one smart dude.”
“Nah. Just wise, charismatic and lucky.”
“HEEEEEEEEYYYYYYYY!” Someone is yelling from behind us. “JOSE! JUN! YOU GUYS STILL ALIVE?” Oh great, it's Theo.
I get up and wave across the room at him. I yell, “yeah but stay back, there's snakes!”
“WHAAAT?”
I point at the hill in front of him. “SNAAAKES!”
We make our way over. Theo and Nat are here. Nat is already putting on a shirt to replace her torn up one.
“Where's Brian?” I ask as I walk up.
“Still scared shitless,” Nat says. “But there are some things you need to know.”
I shrug and wait for the probably bad news.
Theo starts. “Okay so on the news, right? People are tracking the outbreak, that's what they're calling it for now. The outbreak affected the whole world to various degrees. And stuff changed at different times over the course of 24 hours. But the important thing is the dungeons. The ones that have been around for 24 hours, well, they reset.”
Jose and I glance at each other. “The monsters come back?” Jose clarifies.
“Yeah,” says Nat. “But here's the really bad part. Any monsters who died came back different, stronger, apparently.”
That stops me. If we don't get out of here soon we might face stronger monsters? If we don't get out soon we could get trapped in a cycle of making progress, having that be undone, then making less progress the next day because everything is tougher. “That's... Quite bad,” I say.
“Also,” Nat chides us, “You guys know it's like 3:00 AM, right?” We both shrug as if it hadn't occurred to us to check the time. “Our dungeon appeared at about 11:42 AM.”
Theo cut in, always wanting to say the important part. “That means we have just under 9 hours before this place is overrun with monsters again. Bigger, badder monsters.”
Jose and I look at each other. He asks, “do we still do the big hill and hill cluster?”
“Maybe just the big hill,” I say. “Maybe there's a boss monster that'll drop some good loot.”
-----
Time left until monsters respawn: 8 hours, 44 minutes.
Jose and I are about 50 feet from the big hill. The hill itself is made of thousands and thousands of socks. It's about 30 feet tall and twice as wide at the bottom. “You guys should stay back for this,” I call back to Theo and Natalie.
I start pulling Static Snaps. With my new maximum of 10 Arcana I can cast them all at once instead of waiting for the recharge, but we still wait another 10 minutes to give me a few Arcana back. Just in case. Plus after a while Static Snap makes my fingers itch so I don't like the delay for a full recharge.
I give Jose a nod that I'm ready. I take one step forward and am immediately met with a loud rattling. A four foot long array of baby rattles emerges from around back of the hill. They're the kind with a loop at the bottom of the handle. A nest of regular-looking snakes are tied through the rattles, keeping them in place.
I take two more steps forward towards the pile, electrified fingers outstretched. A head slithers forward out of the hill, socks sliding down around it as a massive beast readies for a fight. Its head is made of dozens of soccer cleats giving it a black and white and spiked look. It's hooded like a cobra, the hood made out of a hundred blue and grey shoe insoles. And unfortunately an anaconda wishes it was this big. Its head is three feet across, as is the long snake body behind it. The regular snake parts are colored brown and tan like a python.
It opens its mouth, two foot long fangs greeting me and it suddenly spits at me.
I alter my charge, leaping off my left foot to dodge the spit. It flies inches from my face but I don't stop. When the glob of spit lands I hear the sizzle of acid. This thing is absolutely worse than anything else we've faced and if I don't stun it with a ten finger, 240% proficiency Static Snap, we're all dead.
The boss snake lunges forward and I try to dodge again but I'm nowhere near as fast as this thing. It gets just one of its horrifically long fangs into me and clamps down around my waist. That's when my hands make contact with it, searing the inside of its mouth with thousands of volts of electricity. It reels back but doesn't let go. I feel myself being lifted up and then slammed down. I hear bones break but don't feel the pain yet.
I use Shadow Stab inside the snake's mouth. The spike shoots up into the snake's head, which is still made of shoes. The spike retracts with just one of the dozens of soccer shoes attached to it. Well, that did jack all.
The snake's rattle intensifies. Theo and Nat scream my name. I hear a constant barrage of spikes making contact with the snake's flank. And I hear my voice in my head, saying, this isn't going to work. I'm dead. I look past the shoes into the gross throat beyond. I'm going to be swallowed by this thing and end up in its-
I reach out and touch the roof of the snake's mouth and cast something I thought I'd never use: Hydrate. I'm treated to the sounds of gallons of sloshing liquid as the snake is filled with water. I don't know if it's the water or my attempts at murder, but the snake spits me out.
Theo and Nat rush over to me and drag me from the snake, who is now writhing in pain. The snake is engorged with water, having swelled to almost 18 feet across on its mid section. And it seems to keep swelling.
Jose simply says, “time to pop the balloon,” as he charges golden light into a spike and then hurls it at the snake. It hits with enough force to punch all the way through the snake. Water shoots out, then the hole tears wide open as hundreds of gallons of water pour out the snake's side. Blood gushes from the foot wide hole and the massive shoe snake screeches, grinding its cleat mouth together to cause a terrifically terrible sound.
The whole thing collapses after that, the cleated shoes fall apart, the insoles flop to the floor. The water now flows gently out its side.
A body slides out of the snake. Then another. Then more, in various states of being dissolved by stomach acid. There are some I recognize, employees. Others I don't who had to have been customers. I guess this is why we didn't find any humans up until now.
I lay there and finally look down at myself. That snake fang left a large hole in my gut. It's bleeding a lot. I feel really tired all of a sudden. And cold. Is it cold in here? Nah. I'm probably just bleeding to death. That's okay. There's worse ways to die, really.
-----
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: Corpse will be revived inside of safe room.
I'm semi conscious and see the tail end of the messages this time. Huh. So we're being revived due to a bug in the system. That's... Pretty great, actually.
I open my eyes. I'm back in the break room. My eyepatch is missing. So are my weapons. I get up, go to a vending machine and smash it open with a Shadow Stab. I kick glass clear and grab the $4 fancy iceberg water. It's actually pretty good.
I hear footsteps coming from the TV side of the room and Brian turns the corner. “Oh, Jun, you scared the shit out of me.” He looks past me. “Where are the others? Especially Natalie. Is she okay?”
“Yeah, I think so. I died and respawned here.”
“Oh, shit, sorry man.” He wipes his brow like the short jog from one end of the room to the other made him sweaty. Jose and I really shouldn't have let these guys come with us. “They tell you about the time limit?”
I swallow some glacier water. “Yeah, the monsters come back after 24 hours.”
“Well yeah. Hey uh, Jun, can I show you something?” I shrug unexcitedly. “Over here.” He brings me over to the table where we'd been playing a tabletop RPG. The good kind of RPG, not like those exploding ones. “I need you to keep this a secret.” I take a swig of water and nod. I'm expecting him to tell me he's in love with Nat which, yeah, of course he is.
“So you know how this place turned into a dungeon? Well, I had drawn this a few weeks ago.”
He shows me his tablet computer. There's a dungeon drawn in an illustration program. It's a dungeon version of the Get! store. It's the dungeon we're standing in right now.
I grab the tablet from him and double check it against the fire escape map on the wall. “Holy shit,” I mutter.
“Yeahhhh so around the world, only important places got turned into castles or dungeons.” Brian is wringing his hands now. “Except our store isn't on the caliber of the Smithsonian or the Eiffel Tower. I think that...whatever did this to the world, it took my idea and made it happen.”
I am stunned. This has massive implications. This means that whatever affected the world has the ability to search through computers. This means that maybe what counts as “important” to the system was chosen by data it scraped from computers and the internet. That means... Ah I'm not sure what it means, actually. But something. It definitely means something.
“So anyone who died, it's basically on me, isn't it?” He starts tearing up. “Those screams before. Those people who died. It's ‘cause of me.” He starts bawling.
I know what he's feeling. I got people killed too. There's no fixing it. There's no way back. You're just scarred from then on. You're marked. You have to remember all the people who died and live with knowing that your life probably isn't worth all of theirs.
I hear stomping from down the hall. I click off the tablet and shove it back into Brian's hands. Jose bursts through the door then runs over and tackles me into a bear hug.
“Damn, dude, what gives? You think I died or something?” I laugh, but I'm the only one.
“Specialist Han.” Jose said my name military style so I know I'm in deep shit. “You can NOT count on reviving.”
“I know I just-”
“No!” He takes me by the shoulders and looks me dead in the eyes. “You've died twice in here. You tell me why. Now.”
I look away. I don't want to say. I don't want to say that I've been looking for an excuse to be offed for a while now. That dying in here wouldn't be bad for me. It would be a release.
People don't want to know you're suicidal. It kinda ruins their day. Changes how they look at you. So you end up not telling them.
It takes me a minute to come up with a plausible lie. A partial truth. “You're right. We can't count on being revived. And I'm not taking this seriously.” He releases me and lets me talk. “Part of my brain doesn't recognize this as real so I'm not fully in desperation mode yet.”
“Get there. We need to get these people out.” He says this and over his shoulder I see the guilt on Brian's face. Theo seems shamed. Nat seems annoyed.
“Okay,” I say. I take a deep breath and breathe it out slowly, trying to get into combat mode. “Wait, did you guys change clothes? And is that a gun?”