NOVEL NEXT 86 - Getting increasingly paranoid about how similar the Dungeon is to a corporate office
Rory affixed a lanyard to the end of his Gemstone Quarterstaff. It hung there, a tassel. He laid the staff flat on the office desk, and held his hand out expectantly.
Nothing happened.
"So… are we just going to wait…?" Beatrice said.
"Hmmm, I think I see how this is going, Rorhid," Gelias said. "Now, if you'll focus on the feeling running down your spine…"
The two of them moved towards a more open space between the desks.
"Alright, be like that, learning how to use your junk," Beatrice called after them.
She flopped down in an office chair and swiveled it around.
This was awkward.
"See, this thing," she said, pointing at the chair. "This is weird."
"Weird," Archmund said. His misgivings, suppressed, were now returning.
"It's not the only thing, either," she said. "This place is an administrative office, right? That's my guess, over a prison at least. I guess it makes sense that the dead have those, or that they're trapped in their memories of them? But this junk — I mean, what kind of office has tankards and ropes and hats? "
"I don't think it's that weird," Archmund said. "I hear 'coffee' is pretty popular in the Imperial Capital, so much so that the Omnio actually brought some out with them when they came to visit. They need to keep that hot. Or cold."
The memories of that life long past arose unbidden, when he'd stayed in an office until dawn drinking coffee. Ah, such bittersweet times.
"Coffee is disgusting," Beatrice said. "You really think a tankard that can keep it hot or cold will make it taste any better?"
"I don't mind it. I suppose it appeals to a more sophisticated palate."
She glowered. Belatedly, he remembered how the Princess drowned her coffee in butter and sugar for the extra energy, so much so that it was basically dessert.
"Anyways," Beatrice said. "That's not just it. I mean, what sort of administrative office has a spinny chair like this?"
She kicked her legs up and swirled around. A twist formed in Archmund's stomach.
"For that matter, what kind of office can afford to have a fountain and exotic plants? And these keycards — what kind of office can afford to waste magical Gems on something so mundane? It's baffling."
Archmund said nothing.
She was right. It was odd. It was odder that he remembered these things.
He was convinced, of course, that this world was real. That it was physical, meaningful, true. It wasn't his dying dream, and it wasn't some illusion — it was a real world, a real life, with real consequences.
Which made it all the more bizarre that the Second Tier of the Dungeon resembled a warped and twisted corporate office. Maybe the restless dead had invaded his dreams and shaped their desires after his nightmares. Or maybe these were their own terrors, locked in the distant past.
Maybe offices like these had existed in the land of Omnio once.
Or perhaps the Dungeon was a dialogue between the world and his soul. Perhaps it existed as a response to his existence, for he remembered a world before, and his escape from the life-between-lives had allowed a passage for the other dead to open.
And perhaps in that case, the Dungeon's loot was tailor-made to prepare them for the next challenge.
Oh, that was a suspicion he didn't like. He was probably just being paranoid again. This world wasn't tailor-made for his ego and his challenges; it was its own living, breathing place. Perhaps there was a lost golden age in the past where offices like these existed, or perhaps these were perfectly normal in the Imperial Capital. It wouldn't be all that hard to figure that out.
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"Gotcha!" Rory shouted triumphantly, causing both him and Beatrice to start. As they watched, he held out his hand, and the Quarterstaff jumped into it.
He threw it like a javelin across the tops of the cubicles, and it vanished into the darkness. It crashed, loudly, no doubt into another pile of anachronistic office supplies.
"Why'd you do something as dumb as that?" Beatrice smirked.
Rory beamed back. He held his open palm up in the air.
Like the beating of rhythmic wings, his Gemstone Quarterstaff spun through the air until it landed squarely in his open hand, gleaming with maroon-scarlet light. The Gemstone lanyards attached to both ends swung gently like pendulums.
Archmund gave a light golf clap. "Well done. Pretty impressive."
"Gelias thinks I can use this to [Block] from a distance," Rory said excitedly. "Throw the staff out to intercept swords and arrows without needing to get in close myself. You wanna test it?"
"I don't think doing a training session in the middle of a Dungeon is a remotely good idea," Archmund said.
"Yeah, probably not," Rory said.
"I'm telling you, you don't need practice. That's the whole point of these human brute-force modifications. You already have the Skill, but these tacky adornments piggyback on the abilities you already have so you can change the techniques without any effort."
"Don't tempt me," Archmund said. He wondered if he could apply the lanyard's boomerang effect to any of his Gems and Skills. He had a suspicion that applying it to his Infrared Lance or Fireball would be a bad idea.
But these were useful. And what's more, they were light. He gathered as many lanyards as he could carry and stowed them in his pouches. That set Beatrice off, and she started doing the same, as Rory, Gelias, and Mary watched on in bemusement.
They pushed forward into the Dungeon, not expecting much of the loot to be different.
As they went deeper, the pale blue light of the inexplicable cityscape faded hyperbolically. For every ten feet they walked, into the cubicles and desks and paper stacks, the light of the city faded fifty feet away, as if it were underwater. This was the spatial presence, the weight of the Dungeon.
Archmund felt a building sense of unease. Perhaps it was the growing darkness, or perhaps his sense for magic were sharper than he'd realized.
Although from a distance, the rows of cubicles seemed endless, as they walked closer they would shift and change. Landmarks, faint as they were, would emerge from the distant darkness. Infinity was an illusion.
"Why did you have to throw your staff into the darkness, Rory?" he said.
"Why not? There's nothing here?"
As if on cue, shadows shifted in the darkness.
Archmund sighed. "You just had to say it."
"Say what?"
"It's a Dungeon. Of course there are Monsters here. It's where they live."
"Actually," Gelias said, "Since Monsters are the ghosts of the dead—"
"Now is really not the time."
From the darkness staggered forth three figures of man. They swayed and shook like zombies. They were denser, more potent, more vicious than the basic Monsters of the First Tier, which had been reduced to blackened bone — these had graying flesh, though their cheeks were sallow and sunken, and their eyes remained, though they gleamed with desperation.
They wore lanyards upon their necks upon which hung keycards suffused with dark miasma, and they wore hats, and in their hands they clutched—
One held a thin, sharp spike, the size of a pen, or stylus, or pencil — the exact instrument didn't matter — like an awl or a dagger, clenched in the fist.
One held a hinged flail with two spikes at its tip that looked awfully like a stapler.
The last swung mugs looped upon a lanyards like a bola.
Wonderful. Just wonderful.
Undead Office Workers. Or if he was being laconic, as was the matter of this world, Undead Clerks.
"You know the drill," Archmund said. "Hit hard, hit fast, hit totally. Kill them quickly and they'll drop their core Gems unshaped. The longer you take, the more Gem they extrude as Gear."
And he ducked into a cubicle to let the four of them handle it.
Archmund clambered up the cubicle desk and atop the cubicle wall, until he balanced on the intersection between two cubicles. He could see across the endless rows of the cubicle farm, down the narrow hallways separating them, to the endless darkness.
He chuckled as he kept his eye on the four of them as they stood in the corridor. Rory up front, staff in a guard position, Gelias and Mary besides him with weapons trained on the foe, Beatrice hugging the wall and fading into the shadows.
They looked kind of pissed — well, Beatrice did. Rory looked more exasperated, like he was used this sort of thing. Mary looked like she had just rolled her eyes roughly twenty times. And Gelias looked right at him, uncannily, and gave him a smirk and a thumbs-up.
Right. Okay. Maybe he wasn't giving them enough credit.
Time to focus on what he'd come up here for.
Better to be unobtrusive. To be silent and deadly.
That ruled out the fireball. And, if he wanted to stay near, it ruled out the Gemstone Sword and Gemstone Rapier. He wanted to be a scalpel, not a chainsaw.
That just left his tried-and-true: the Infrared Lance.
He gazed out into the darkness, feeling with his intuition for magic, looking for spots where the darkness was deeper and denser, where more Monsters were forming and condensing, and he fired his Infrared Lance. Over and over and over, having only the faintest guess if his spells met their mark from the slightest shiftings in the shadows. He saw this with the sense beyond seeing, so he could keep his eyes on his companions, and turn his power to aid them if they really needed it.
Down below, in that narrow corridor, Mary raised her fan up high and Gelias readied his bow, as Rory began to twirl his staff in anticipation of incoming blows.