NOVEL NEXT Chapter 38: Labyrinth
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Claire: And the extra guidance Marie wanted gives us: more specialized dungeons. And… she has to take the 300 delve.
Marie: I feel like I may have shot myself in the foot, here.
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Tuesday, November 12th, 2090, about 5:45 pm MST, Montana City
The dungeon smelled of grey mold and crude oil. Crumbling stone brick walls with inlaid frescoes depicting gruesome acts of death and cannibalism rose twenty feet to a side, six feet apart.
Harry's knight, broad in his armor even without the shield, took point. Gordon took rear—an extra ten feet or so meant little against his pistol's range, but could buy him time to make an aimed shot rather than a snapshot—despite his skill, he saw no reason to inflate the difficulty. This was going to be, by all reports, hard enough already.
He'd muted the chat overlay entirely, uninterested in their commentary since nobody'd yet beaten this dungeon and anything they had to say would be encouragement—appreciated—backseat driving—less so—or speculation. His field of view was, in fact, completely unimpeded. No event tracker, no minimap, nothing at all but the labyrinth and its contents.
The floors were ground stone, glass-smooth beneath powder of the same composition. It set up an unpleasant cloud with their footprints, and showed tracks clearly.
They were also, clearly, freshly swept.
Karen slunk beside him, keeping to the ground level with great reluctance—they'd all agreed to start the day off low, and go high if circumstances forced the issue. Climbing the tops of the maze wall was so tempting—for Gordon, for Karen—they were sure there had to be some sort of nasty surprise up there. The devs had to know it was an option, after all.
"You hear that?" Karen asked, her voice tight. The sound of faint, distant grunting and the clangor of metal on stone floated to them vaguely. It was impossible to say from where.
"It's dragging its axe on the floor behind it," predicted Harry. "To frighten us."
Claire snorted. Each hand held a staff, her headdress blazed with light, and her irises shone as if backlit by portals to hell. Gordon wondered what she was channeling. "Good luck with that," she said casually.
So far, there was no sign of traps—or footprints, for that matter. Nothing but the steady dripping sounds of water and the distant grating sound of stone mechanisms, punctuated by the clanging of the axe in the distance. The maze was immense—the corridor only seemed to bend by about a foot or so for every twenty feet they walked. Every now and again, the floor shook slightly, a layer of dust dislodging from the walls around them and falling in chalky plumes to the powder-caked floor.
"I wonder," mused Gordon, attempting to triangulate the sounds he was hearing. "Okay, Harry? The corridor is arcing about 5 degrees per twenty feet. Quick, what's the radius of the maze?"
"I hate it when he does this—ugh. Fine, five degrees per twenty feet… call it two-thirty feet."
"So, since we know about how far away the center is, we can pretend it's a 500 ft square because I think in squares. And… the grinding is in what I'm calling the northern square—"
"—That's east," interrupted Karen.
"Eastern square, then. And the weapon-free sound is from the western square."
"We can assume Harry's right about that being the baddie. Minotaur, probably. Close-up melee fighter, probably with a bull rush attack."
"Not a lot of room for that in here," Claire noted.
"I'd guess they've figured out a workaround," Gordon countered. "Either way, our choices are fairly clear—go toward or away from the scary guy with the weapon?"
"Towards," said Harry, his knightly chest puffed out.
"Chat says 'use the left-hand rule'," reported Claire. "That's stupid."
"If the walls move, yeah. Otherwise, it's solid advice," argued Harry.
"Harry's mom is solid advice," muttered Karen under her breath, removing a saber from her scabbard and scanning the ceiling for threats.
"That's it, we're all bored," Gordon said quickly. "Let's go looking for trouble."
It was not, of course, as easy as all that. Moving towards something, even something as straightforward as 'due west,' is by definition a bit tricky in a labyrinth.
Still, switch-back by switch-back, they were making progress. The dragging metal sound was clearly audible, now—though still difficult to pin down, what with how sounds echoed in the hard stone passageways. Gordon's head was on a swivel, half-expecting the monster to come around any given corner with mere seconds' notice.
Instead, the faint scrape of stone on stone provided a mere instants' warning as the /walls/ next to Gordon split, opening into arched doors ten feet in height—and revealing the already-in-motion form of a titanic, black-furred beast. It was too late to run. It was too late to dodge. For the second time that day, Gordon's back spasmed at simulated pain from Ghostlands, his real body writhing as much as his character's as he was unceremoniously knocked clear off his feet, propelled through a doorway, and slammed with crushing force into the onrushing wall.
The doorways closed behind him, leaving him alone with the minotaur. The last thing he saw before they did was Harry's shocked face, comical behind the overdone beard.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
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"Well," groaned Gordon, "We doing this or what?"
The minotaur, which had stepped back as though to give him space to get to his feet, nodded its massive head, intelligence shining clearly in its eyes. It rested the haft of its great spiked maul on the ground, two hands on the maul's head. Each was the size of Gordon's chest. "At your leisure," the creature rumbled.
Gordon flexed his back. His real bones snapped like popcorn. Gordon felt feather-light touches of Karen's real hands, seemingly questioning if he was all right. He cracked his neck too, for good measure. "My thanks," he said simply. "That was honorable. If I'm being honest, I could probably sleep for days straight at this point. Not your problem. May I have your name?"
"You have little use for it," the minotaur suggested. It shrugged great shoulders cased in iron-banded armor. "I shall either be the stone upon which you break, or upon which you step to journey higher. Either way, a stone is what I am to you, and that is enough."
Gordon wasn't sure how to follow that, but raised his eyebrows and looked his opponent up and down. There was a lot of up to look at. "Then let's see which it will be," he said finally. "You'd have got a better fight from Harry, though—just a suggestion for next time."
The minotaur shifted its massive arms, bringing the maul to a ready position, but Gordon was already in full flight, an ironic smile on his lips.
Wall running is something of a parlor trick. It works, it has its uses, but it isn't magic—if the sum of forces acting on your body is neutral in terms of horizontal movement, then a step onto a wall won't give you any grip, and you won't get any vertical gain from it. You have to move fast enough into the wall to counter the kick-off you're about to make to get a vertical gain from it. To chain steps, you have to either have two step-kicks that total to about the velocity at which you'd approached the wall—or have an opposing wall to kick off.
Six feet is a difficult distance for that, in real life. It's possible, with the right shoes and the right surface, but it's certainly not easy, even if you're over six feet yourself. But in Ghostlands?
He rushed at the wall and kicked off with his left foot, hard. The opposite wall, a second later, leaving him five feet in the air. Spring - jump - jump - ten feet. The footsteps of his opponent were growing louder. Two more and he'd got hands onto the walltop, which was good timing because the minotaur's maul hit his left foot at about the same time, utterly destroying the in-game part and suffusing the real thing with pins and needles, instantly robbing Gordon of balance as his ankle collapsed. "COWARD!" roared the creature indignantly. "FACE ME LIKE A MAN!"
Gordon pulled himself up onto the walltop, straddling it gingerly. No spikes, no saw blades, nothing to fear so far. "WHERE IS YOUR DIGNITY?" wailed the confused creature, the lowing tones of a bull seeping into his voice.
"Sometimes dignity isn't about what other people think," Gordon told him. "We make our own dignity."
Then Gordon shot it. A lot.
After he'd reloaded a couple of times, the minotaur finally backed off, retreating from the withering, sustained gunfire, sparks jumping from its armor as it went. Gordon wasn't sure how often he'd actually done any damage, but he could live with this outcome for now.
He felt a little guilty about how he'd done it, though.
"Now… where is my party, and how the hell am I going to get off this wall?"
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Karen was questioning everything. Why had she touched him like that, with the camera rolling? He wasn't really hurt, she knew that. But he'd been grunting and thrashing, and she'd slipped off her headset for just a second, just to … what, let him know she was concerned? Stupid, stupid, stupid.
She'd left the others behind a while back—something about 'forting up' with lava being antithetical to her very nature.
Plus, if the monster wanted to get them alone, it might be more fun to give it what it wanted.
Oh well.
Karen prowled the corridors. She had fought large things before—mostly trolls and ents. It would take at least three trolls to match the weight of a Minotaur. That didn't dissuade her. If anything, it made the fight more exciting.
One of the main reasons she had built a tank-breaking class was for the thrill of fighting much larger opponents. When she was younger, she had obsessively played games where the protagonist climbed building-sized creatures, striking at their weak points. Something about that fantasy had never quite left her.
It was the only reason she would have ever considered playing on the Belt server.
The Belt and Wilds servers—well, not lawless, exactly, but corporate-controlled in the way only the United Nations could enforce. Rule of law, by the consent of the governed? That was a joke in places like the Belt. And the developers had reflected that in the game, making the Wilds into a vast, untamed jungle filled with enormous creatures.
Dinosaurs. Dragons. Giants. Titans. Colossi.
She'd spent hours poring over wiki entries about the legendary monsters of the other servers, drooling over content she couldn't access.
Maybe someday. But not today.
It was too bad it wasn't available from Earth yet.
Still—a Minotaur? That could be fun.
She turned a corner, still moving. She realized, belatedly, that she wasn't really paying attention to her surroundings—something she corrected casually, subtly, so no one would notice. She reached into her real-life pocket, pulled out a Crunch bar, and popped a piece into her mouth.
Was her sugar getting low? Or was she just a little depressed after embarrassing herself in front of the stream? She wasn't sure. But with hypoglycemia, it was better to be safe than sorry. Besides, she could use some chocolate right now.
"Gordon."
She wasn't sure why she said his name out loud. And if she was going to say it out loud, she wasn't sure why she said it in-game. But there it was.
"Present," he said from somewhere nearby.
She looked up.
Gordon was straddling the wall twenty feet above her, a trail of blood and gore running down the stone from where his foot had once been. She could see the empty leg of his pants flapping slightly.
Where was his enchanted moccasin?
She glanced around but didn't see it.
Most likely, it would respawn with his foot. As long as he wore the other one while he got healed, mechanics tended to handle little conveniences like that. But still, she kept an eye out.
"Gordon," she said again.
He glanced down.
"What's a handsome guy like you doing hanging around a place like this?"
"Extremely funny," he told her. He looked genuinely happy to see her. "Wanna give me a hand down?"
He extended a hand down to her, half-jokingly.
She considered it thoughtfully.
"You know, I don't think I could," she admitted. "I didn't pack any rope today."
There was a brief silence during which they both considered their poor decision making.
At length, she offered: "Would you like some company? Just until I see the Minotaur, of course."
"Of course."
He made a half-motion to shift and make room for her, but that was silly.
There was plenty of wall to go around.