Killer Dungeon (Euphoria Online Book 3)

  KILLER DUNGEON

  Book 3 of Euphoria Online

  Copyright © 2018 Phil Tucker

  All rights reserved.

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  About the Author

  Kickstarter Backers

  The Path of Flames

  1

  Even with thirty orcs at my back, Lotharia and Brianna by my side and a host of newly purchased spells, my heart beat rapidly as I stepped outside the safety of Castle Winter’s walls. We walked cautiously over the great drawbridge and paused before the ruined barbican to search the environs for the orc warrior Lagash.

  Wary, Void Blade in hand, I probed the shadows with Darkvision. No sign of her.

  “She can’t be that dangerous,” said Brianna, curling a strand of red hair behind her ear. “She’s only level thirty-one. You’ll be fine.”

  “She was level thirty-one when we first met,” I said, scanning the ragged battlements. “But she probably leveled a bunch like I did when we defeated the keep. But yeah. She’s that dangerous.”

  “I don’t see her,” said Lotharia quietly. “Though I feel like we’re being watched.”

  The orcs behind us were grumbling to each other, shifting their weight from foot to foot and causing the massive beams of the drawbridge to groan.

  “All right,” I said. “Good luck, Brianna. We’ll be back as soon as we can.”

  She gave me a mocking salute. “Luck? I don’t need luck with fifty orcs and Shaman Lickit eating out of my hand. Just don’t take too long. I don’t want to get bored waiting for you.”

  I fought the urge to roll my eyes and gave her a tight smile instead. Then I led the way through the barbican, Lotharia by my side, the orcs streaming past Brianna who stood and watched us depart.

  “You think Lagash headed straight for the meadow?” asked Lotharia.

  “To grab Falkon as hostage? Maybe. But it doesn’t feel like her style. She’s brutal but she’s fair. Grabbing Falkon feels too… cheap for her.”

  “I hope you’re right,” said Lotharia, and then she took my hand with a jerk, as if finally giving in to an impulse she’d been debating ever since we left the castle.

  I smiled and gave her hand a squeeze, controlling the urge to tease her when she blushed. Instead, I returned to studying the cliff faces and dark forest that cloaked the mountainside as we cut away from the path that led straight down to the undead town of Feldgrau and made our way toward the highland meadow.

  After a few minutes of walking in silence, the orcs struck up a marching song that was as crude as it was hilarious. As far as I could tell it was about a goblin assistant’s attempts to butter the inside of the head cook’s cooking pot. The innuendo wasn’t subtle, but the orcs’ roars of laughter and the repeated refrain of, “But the heat was too hot and the bar of butter ran soft!” had Lotharia and I fighting to hide our grins.

  The song died as we cleared a crest of rock: a group was making its way up the path toward us. I raised a hand, heart suddenly hammering. Had Vanatos and the Beggars of Solomon teleported back so quickly, and with reinforcements? There were some twenty individuals making their way toward us from the highland meadow, none of them alike, and I anxiously scanned their ranks for a familiar face, be it friend or foe.

  “Falkon’s with them,” said Lotharia, pointing. “Look!”

  There at the front was my friend, clad only in the basic respawning gear of tunic, pants, and boots. No shackles, no bonds. He and his group had also stopped short at the sight of us, and then I realized they were staring past Lotharia and me at the orcs.

  “He thinks we’re prisoners,” I said. “Hey! Falkon! You all right?”

  “Fine!” came his distant shout. “You?”

  “Great!” I fought the urge to laugh, and turned to gesture at the thirty orcs. “These are friends!”

  Falkon’s disparate group visibly relaxed, and I realized that despite their differences in height, race, and age, all of them were dressed in the same basic respawning gear as Falkon.

  “Chris,” said Lotharia, touching my arm. “I know who they are.”

  The group resumed marching toward us, Falkon at their head beside a broad-shouldered blond man of imposing stature and presence.

  “They’re old members of Cruel Winter,” she continued. “Of course! They were trapped in the keep when Xylagothoth captured it.”

  “Oh, damn,” I said. “So when we killed Xyla…?”

  “Right. They were all released to respawn in the highland meadow.”

  “Those’ll be the AI controlled avatars, though, right? The players won’t have logged in this quickly?”

  Lotharia nodded hesitantly. “Yeah. Probably.”

  The group were drawing closer. A Norse-looking half-giant twice as tall as the others loomed at the back. I made out an elderly dwarf with a trailing beard and a young dwarven lady with bright green hair. A horned young woman with lavender skin; an old, stout lady built like a wardrobe; and many more.

  “Oh, wow!” Lotharia actually clapped. “See that blond guy next to Falkon? That’s Ragnar Dragonbane!” She glanced sidelong at me. “The castle’s castellan? Chris, he’s almost level forty. And there – see the old dwarf just to his side? Ulfsted the Wise, the third most powerful mage in Cruel Winter after Everetos and Jeramy.” She sagged with relief. “Thank god. We’re going to be OK. Lagash and the Beggars are out of luck!”

  I studied the blond man as he approached. Falkon was talking animatedly to him, gesturing and half turning every few steps like a kid trying to impress a sports hero. Ragnar’s expression was stern, just shy of forbidding, his features harsh and strikingly handsome. Even in his tunic and loose pants he looked formidable, with heavily muscled shoulders and a broad chest, his stride loose and graceful like that of a professional dancer or born warrior. His blond hair was cut short around the sides and thick across the top, and his face was clean-shaven.

  He did look formidable.

  “Chris!” Falkon gave another wave. “You did it! Lotharia? All right!” He gave a fist pump and beamed. “And look who’s here! You’re not going to believe it!

  The group slowed and stopped before us. Ragnar and everyone else examined me, their gaze flicking up and down my gear before moving past me to the restive orcs.

  “Chris Meadows?” Ragnar’s voice was rich and mellow, but it was easy to imagine him raising it to a roar mid-battle.

  “Hey,” I said, feeling awkward. I stepped forward and extended my hand. “Ragnar?”

  For a moment he regarded me, his expression dour, but then he grinned and clasped my wrist, nearly crushing it with his grip as he shook it hard. “Back from the dead. And thanks to you, I’m told?
”

  I tried to squeeze back but failed miserably. When he released my arm, I restrained the urge to rub life back into it. “Yeah. To Lotharia and me. And an orc warrior called Lagash.”

  The old dwarf Ulfsted stepped forward. He was bald as an egg on top, but had a wild mane of white hair that spread down from the sides of his head over his shoulders and merged with his impressively bushy eyebrows. His beard nearly reached his feet, and his eyes glimmered with intelligence and humor. “An impressive feat, young one. There was a cataclysm – a terrible stroke of magic! And all was rent asunder. We were thrown into the void, overwhelmed and overpowered.” He raised his hands, looking up between them at the heavens as he did so. A bit theatrical, this guy. “We dreamed strange dreams… and then awoke.”

  Ulfsted dropped his hands and grinned. “It’s been far too long since I had a beer. Will you tell us your tale over a cold brew?”

  The blond half-giant at the back rubbed his palms together with a sound like sandpaper on stone. “Aye. A barrel or two of Castle Brew will finish waking me up, it will.” His voice was a low, cavernous grumble.

  “To the castle, then,” said Ragnar, half turning to regard his crew. “To our home. Chris, ask your orcs to step aside, if you will.”

  I sensed it immediately. Ragnar taking control of the situation, stepping right back into his role as the authority figure. It rankled. Yet to argue with him would be churlish, and hell, I needed him and his friends on my side. So I nodded to the lead orc, and they parted so Ragnar could stride forward, Falkon stepping aside to join Lotharia and me as the other Cruel Winter members marched past.

  “Damn, Chris!” Falkon shook me by the shoulder. “How the hell did you do it? Last thing I remember was that crazy hall of mirrors, and being inside Balthus’ body. And Lotharia!” He pulled her into a tight hug then stepped back. “You OK?”

  She smiled. “Working on it. Mostly, yeah.”

  Falkon wrapped an arm around each of our shoulders and urged us back onto the path, following the tail end of the group back up to the castle. “Seriously, though. What happened? You clear the keep?”

  So I told him. About Lagash and I fighting our way through, then Shadow Stepping our way out onto that giant web. The dream trap Xyla had laid for me, how Lotharia had pulled me free, our battle, then my finally destroying the rune box that killed Xyla for good.

  Falkon let out a low whistle. “That’s epic. And all in Death March mode? Insane.”

  “Listen, Falkon.” I watched the group ahead of us. “How well do you know these guys who have come back? Ragnar and the rest?”

  “Decently well. I mean, I was just a low-level squire back then, so I didn’t talk to Ragnar much, but I was good friends with Katie over there, Edmund Gray, Inendi and Hannah. You’ll meet them all soon enough. Though of course that’s only their avatars being run by Albertus right now. The real players are probably being notified that their avatars are back online and being given the option to return and play them.”

  “Like you were when we freed you,” I said. “Of course. Ragnar… do you think he’s going to be a problem?”

  “Problem?” Falkon looked sidelong at me. “Dude, he’s going to be a huge asset. With him back, it’s going to be tough to mess with Cruel Winter.”

  “Right,” I said. That wasn’t what I meant. I wanted to say, Is he going to take over? Is he going to ruin the best and most terrifying and exhilarating experience of my life? But Falkon kept glancing over at Ragnar with a nervous smile and gleaming eyes, and the words died in my throat. “Right,” I said again.

  “Anyways, listen.” Falkon leaned in. “While I was trapped in the keep, I logged out to check if my friend in the Senior Dev team had any updates on that Jeramy user question I’d asked him to check out. Remember that red tape issue he’d run into?”

  “No,” said Lotharia. “I was comatose inside a spider keep. What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Oh, right,” said Falkon. “Well, I wanted to find out who Jeramy’s player was. Because Jeramy’s at the heart of this mess, yeah? He’s the one Albertus came after in the form of Uxureus, the god of undeath. Sent Guthorios the Dread Lord and an army of the dead to capture Castle Winter so as to get at Jeramy.”

  “Right,” said Lotharia. “And I’ve got some info for you on that, too.”

  “Yeah? Awesome. So anyways, I figured learning more about Jeramy was key to figuring out this mess. But when I asked Swen, my buddy, he ran into all sorts of blocks preventing him from doing so, which was really weird given his access levels. So I left him working on it, and when I logged out to check there was a message from him waiting for me.”

  I waited a beat as Falkon just grinned at us. “And?”

  “Jeramy’s player was Juan Antonio Jiménez.”

  It was a name anyone obsessed with Albertus or Euphoria would know. A name that had achieved rock star status a few years back before fading from view. One of the Salvation Six, as the group had been called, the team assembled by the United Nations to spearhead the Universal Doctor program and cobble Albertus together from the disparate computer networks, cloud intelligences and quantum processing centers around the world. Juan had looked like nothing so much as Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead, a wild-haired, bespectacled messiah who was as famous for his love of women and his gregarious charisma as his savant coding talents.

  I’d watched, transfixed like the rest of the world, as what had started as a Hail Mary endeavor to pull the world back from the brink of economic and political disaster caused by climate change had slowly morphed into the Albertus AI. Several movies had been made about the year when Juan and the other five coders, each leading a team of specialists hired from the biggest tech companies in the world, had woven the code that spun Albertus out of nothingness.

  Weather system programs, stock market systems, police networks, countless research computer systems, satellite operations, international cloud networks, dozens of proto-AIs and so much more had been sewn and welded together, united by a dazzling program and interfaced through incredible effort until on March 31st, 2043, the world had stopped to watch as the Salvation Six gathered in the ‘God lab’ – as it had come to be called in Brussels – and set in motion the program that gave life to Albertus.

  “Jiménez?” asked Lotharia. “Jeramy was Jiménez? I spent all that time partying with…?” She looked suddenly faint.

  “Right,” said Falkon. “And it’s no coincidence Jiménez disappeared from the scene when Cruel Winter was overrun. Swen’s good; he checked the dates. Jiménez collapsed while working on Euphoria earlier this year and has been on life support ever since. No brain activity at all.”

  “Holy crap,” I whispered. I raked my hand through my hair. “That’s… that’s insane. Albertus took out one of the Salvation Six? What about the others?”

  “Black Nero and Marcus Andrade are still involved,” said Falkon. “But the other three all stepped away from the Universal Doctor project a few months ago. No official statements were made, but I heard through my network of friends that they resigned from being actively involved to supposedly becoming technology advisers to support the board and dev teams.”

  Lotharia’s voice was as hushed as mine had been, as if by speaking quietly we could avoid Albertus’ notice. “You think they were threatened too?”

  Falkon shrugged. “I don’t know. Price Waterman made that big to-do about going into philanthropy. May Kasahara recused herself and went into that spiritual retreat in South Carolina. And nobody knows where Infinity Ramujan went. He just disappeared.”

  “Infinity was always my favorite,” I said. “What a badass.”

  “Falkon,” said Lotharia, “while I was a prisoner in the keep, I learned a little more about what Albertus was up to. He wanted to capture Jeramy, and to that end he used Xyla to try and snare him. Xyla wasn’t a quest boss or anything designed to interfac
e with players. He was specifically designed to capture archamagi, pure and simple.”

  “But Jeramy escaped,” I said. “Escaped to his tower, where he cast the ward that sealed off the underground and this treasure of his from Albertus and all other NPCs. Which makes more sense now, knowing that he was Jiménez all along. If anyone could go up against Albertus, it would be one of his creators.”

  “I don’t know,” said Falkon, rubbing the back of his head. “Albertus has gotten so much more complex that even the Salvation Six don’t understand him anymore.”

  Lotharia was biting her lower lip. “Well, obviously something went wrong between them. Albertus turned on Jeramy and tried to get this mysterious treasure from him. When he couldn’t, he flatlined Jeramy in the real world, which is insane. So what could this treasure be? What would one of the Salvation Six have hidden in Euphoria that Albertus couldn’t get at?”

  We walked in silence for a spell, each of us deep in our own thoughts. Castle Winter rose into view, and the group before us let out a ragged cheer at the sight of it, slowing and then stopping altogether.

  “It looks like crap,” rumbled the half-giant, voicing what the others were clearly thinking.

  “What happened?” demanded a blond woman with the look of an eagle about her. She could have been a valkyrie. Red tattoos like Nordic runes ringed her arms and she looked fey and perilous, an equal, perhaps, to Lagash’s lethality. “Where is Jeramy?”

  “Inside,” said Ragnar. “We’ll learn everything we need to know once we’re inside. Come on.”

  The group made their way down the cliff path toward the gatehouse below.

  “Ragnar,” I called out, and strode forward, my friends behind me. The members of Cruel Winter turned, surprised, and then parted for me.

  “What is it?” asked the former castellan.

  “Let me go first,” I said, immediately hating myself for asking permission. “The castle is guarded by my orcs. They’ll attack you if they don’t see me.”

  “Very well, Chris.” Ragnar’s smile was dour. “Lead the way.”

  So I did. My thoughts whirled as I marched down to the barbican. How to handle this new influx of allies? How to navigate the situation so I didn’t lose control? Should I even try to retain control, for that matter? Might it not be better to let Ragnar run things while I focused on the real problem at hand?