When I came to, I had a hard time remembering who I was, where I was, why I was there, and why in the world I hurt so much. Also, why was there a little blue Elionne rubbing a damp cloth across my forehead?
My eyes fluttered open on their own but they didn’t want to focus. Strange images kept floating in front of them, shapes of bags and maps and weird colored bars in red, blue, and yellow. The blue and yellow were much longer, but the red bar kept trying to grow.
It hurt to think and it hurt to not think. I floated in that state of partial awareness for … well, I don’t know how long. My sense of time would say minutes then hours then days then minutes again. Slowly, I tried to put together the fragments of memory even as new strange shapes joined the bars. There was something like a shield, something like a set of stars, and something like a skull with a big red X over it.
First question. Who was I? My name…? Alexis? No, that was part of it. Madelyn Alexis. Yes. Yes! That felt right.
Second question. Where was I? On the ground, no a floor. A stone floor, slumped up against a stone wall. It wasn’t any place familiar, so that was the next question.
Why was I where I was? There was … a fight? Yes, but not quite. Something about travelling. Something about…. I couldn’t quite grasp it. It was something important, but it was complicated. Skip it.
Next question. Why was I so sore? It felt like someone had been beating me over and over with large sticks and stones. Were my bones broken? Was my neck broken? Is that why I couldn’t move?
I tried again, not big movements, but little ones. My fingers wouldn’t move, my tail wouldn’t move….
Then…. Then some of the shapes disappeared. The stars disappeared. The red bar seemed longer. The skull with an X disappeared, and everything came back in a flash of clarity.
I was, but wasn’t Madelyn Alexis. She was my character in a game, but I was different when I wasn’t here. One of those shapes, that skull maybe, had shown a status effect that just faded. I remembered how to open my combat log. The last message:
You are no longer confused!
Well, I was but not to the extent I had been. I now remembered that I was a person playing a character in virtual reality and wasn’t thinking of myself as actually a Tauros girl. If the confusion effect could mess with thoughts that much, I would have to further increase Willpower to aid in resisting it. Also, the message right above it said I was no longer stunned. Could I move?
Slowly, I tried to sit up, nearly blacking out again as waves of pain shot throughout my entire body and crashed inside my skull. “Ugh…. Just kill me already so the pain will go away.”
“Hey…,” Sunrise Sparkle’s voice was soft and full of concern. “Most of the pain will go away once your health fully regenerates. That will take a few more minutes. Or you could drink a health potion from your inventory. But congratulations! You beat the skeleton!”
I groaned again and tried not to move much, letting myself remain slumped against the wall where I had apparently landed. “If this is what winning feels like, I’d hate to be the loser.”
“You had one point of health remaining. You were very nearly almost dead, yourself. That fight is supposed to be challenging, but not that hard. I wonder if it is because you’re a Heroine?”
The pain was starting to become manageable, relatively speaking. I still hurt all over, but not like being beaten half to death. Well, almost all the way to death. It was feeling more like the day after trying to keep up with my twin on one of her all-day outdoors and exercise expeditions followed by sleeping in a poorly pitched tent with tree roots and stones underneath. Sadly, that was a comparison I could make. “I … I don’t know. If I wasn’t a Heroine, I would have lost a lot sooner. I wouldn’t have had Mistshard and I wouldn’t have had the couple extra points of Defense from the accessory and I wouldn’t have had the point in every attribute from the title. Less Defense, less health, no offense….”
“Hey, that skeleton was also bigger, taller, faster, and had double the health of any of the ones I’ve seen other Travellers fight.”
I shrugged, wincing as my bruised and battered body complained. “I don’t know then. Maybe the encounter was supposed to scale to the strength of the player and it misjudged me? If you don’t mind, I think I’m just going to quietly sit here and not move for a while longer.” I fumbled a little bit in my inventory, made clumsy due to sore and stiff muscles and protesting joints. “Here, have another berry while you wait on me.”
Her metabolism must have been sky high to have been able to eat even one of those berries and have room for more. And she had already gone through several of them. “And thank you. If I didn’t have that spell that you taught me, the skeleton would have triumphed for sure.”
She blushed, cheeks darkening to a violet-tinged blue, and mumbled something that I couldn’t quite make out.
Meanwhile, I rested and slowly became less and less sore. If I wasn’t actually experiencing it, I wouldn’t have believed that a human body (well, a Tauros body in my case) could heal that quickly. It was still slow in terms of game time—though the out-of-combat regeneration rate was much faster than the in-combat rate—but a beating like I had suffered, even without any broken bones, would have taken days or weeks to recover from out in the real world.
However, in less than ten minutes—ten long, painful minutes—my health bar was almost entirely recovered. While I was still somewhat sore, the pain was no longer an impediment, so I got to my feet and looked around. That skeleton should have some loot for me, after all! The beating I just recovered from needn’t be in vain!
Moving slowly and stretching as I did so, I made my way the few feet to where the remains of the skeleton lay sprawled out on the floor. Then, I remembered that the loot should already be in my inventory. Sadly, it’s loot appeared to be nothing special: bone chips, copper coins, no staff, and…. “Huh. The skeleton had a miniature treasure chest?”
The coins and bone chips were left in my inventory, but I held up the little chest so that Sunrise Sparkle could see and comment on it. The chest was barely bigger than my palm but otherwise resembled a copper-reinforced, wooden treasure chest. For some reason, it made me think of a jewelry box, though that seemed a bit out of place for a skeleton.
“Hey! Congrats! You found some rare loot!”
She then went into full tutorial-guide mode and explained in perhaps a bit more detail than I really needed. Apparently, monsters, animals, and any encounter in instanced dungeons had a chance of dropping a rare loot treasure box when it was defeated. Significantly, sapient beings such as villagers, guards, merchants, and even bandits—including those of races normally considered monsters in other games, such as Goblins, Ratkin, and Imps—did not normally have a chance to drop rare loot. Exceptions included instanced content, raiding parties, and special events or quest chains. This was likely in an effort to keep Travellers from just wanton massacre as even regular loot was reduced from such encounters.
These treasure chests came in several degrees of quality, denoting the rarity of the items inside. The first, and lowest, was the one I found: copper. Above it were silver, then gold, then assorted gem-encrusted ones. Typically, the loot found in a treasure chest would be equipment or accessories, but could include crafting materials, money, rare potions, and so on. Also, the equipment and accessories would typically be soul-bindable, meaning that they couldn’t be stolen once bound … but also couldn’t be sold. Before binding, though, such loot was saleable (and, presumably stealable though how that would work with PvP disabled, I wasn’t sure). In fact, it was expected that the unopened treasure chests themselves could become a valuable commodity for those wishing to gamble on their contents. However, the guaranteed chest from the tutorial instance couldn’t be sold or traded. Which meant … time to open it!
For all its diminutive size, the little treasure chest appeared to use the same mechanics as its larger cousin back on the platform where I had started. That is, it was much larger on the inside than on the outside, and thus was able to contain something much larger than one would have expected it to otherwise. And what this treasure chest contained was a bow. Longer than my starter bow by a few inches, it was exquisitely carved from a dark wood that contrasted with a spiraling pattern of lighter wood inlay. The lighter wood, itself, was carved with some sort of script or pattern of symbols. The bow’s string shimmered like braided silver.
Enchanted Zulathan Great Bow (unattuned): [Bindable] [Attuneable] [DUR: 160/160] Increases damage of arrows by 10%. Enchantment: [Duration: 30 minutes] [Cooldown: 48 hours] [Special: 10% chance per activation to reduce maximum durability by 20]: When attuned to an element, the enchantment can be activated to allow the bow to consume 5 durability in order to imbue an arrow fired from it with the power of that element. Imbued arrow damage is doubled and is converted to elemental magic damage of the attuned element. Imbued arrows are consumed by the enchantment and are not recoverable.
It was a very nice bow though it did have a couple critical flaws. At first glance, the chiefest of the flaws was that it actually consumed the arrows it fired when the enchantment was activated. That meant, until I got more arrows, I would be limited to only thirty imbued shots and then I’d be out of luck for any archery at all. However, with it also costing the bow’s durability to fire such arrows, I wouldn’t have much more than thirty shots anyway, and as time went on and the max durability decreased, I’d have fewer. The “special” chance the enchantment had to decrease the bow’s max durability meant that even if the bow was very good now (and it sure seemed to be), it would eventually become worthless. Planned obsolescence might be good for the game economy, but it was kind of a downer for the individual.
The other major flaw was the long cooldown. Throughout my gaming history, it seemed that any ability with a long cooldown—and in some cases that meant ten minutes or more—rarely got used; the mentality was “don’t use them to speed up encounters; save them for true emergencies.” But careful play meant that true emergencies were hopefully few and far between. They still did happen, of course. Mistakes and unhappy surprises were part of the experience, especially when going blind into new areas that hadn’t yet been researched and documented.
At a two-day cooldown, the enchantment on that bow was likely to remain as unused as the charges on the Ring of Limited Wishes. Nevertheless, it was still an improvement over the Traveller’s Basic Longbow I was using, and a magic bow certainly fit the playstyle I was developing here. Thus, I bound the bow and attuned it to Elemental Water to match Mistshard. Perhaps diversifying would have been better at the start, giving options against two different elemental weaknesses—and not being hard-blocked by one strong resistance—but in my experience, specializing paid off in the long run. Imagine a future accessory that granted bonus damage to water-based attacks: it wouldn’t help the bow’s enchantment if I had chosen a different element, such as Light.
But that was the future and this was now. There was more to this room than just the dead skeleton and its loot.
First, I recovered my staff from where it had landed after having been knocked from my unresponsive hands. Then, the most important thing to investigate was that pedestal that I had been driven into. There were several others like it spread around the room, but that one had made an impression on me—almost literally. Even though the pain itself had now faded, the memory of that pain would likely last longer than I would like.
Perhaps “lectern” would have been a better descriptor than “pedestal,” as the stone structure with its relatively thin pillar and wide, sloped top really did look like something a college professor would stand behind and lecture from. A professor with a flair for the baroque, anyway. In this case, the pedestal, lectern, whatever had probably been intended for a mage of some sort, as it and the five others were all facing toward the center of the room. More tellingly, however, was the faceted green gem resting in a carved depression on the top. The gem was sparkling, flickering almost, with a faint inner light.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
I couldn’t see the tops of all the other stone structures to tell, but the one nearest me on the left seemed to have a violet flicker, so maybe another gemstone there.
“Looks like some more treasure to make the pounding I took in that fight worth it….” As I spoke, I reached out to take the green gem, but as my fingertips touched it, all hell—figuratively—broke loose—quite literally.
I felt a sensation that was a cross between being flung upward and the suggestion of movement I had had when appearing into the tutorial instance. Bare moments later, I was standing outside, a few minutes walk from the base of the little hill that had contained the sunken tower.
It wasn’t just a “get out of the dungeon free” card, however. Half the hillside and a large portion of the surrounding ground exploded upward, flinging boulders and other debris every which way, though fortunately none close enough to me to be a hazard. I could now see a side of the sunken tower, which didn’t appear damaged, so hopefully the Ratkin scholar was safe.
But from the ruined ground arose a figure. And kept rising. Dust swirled about it, obscuring it at first, but if there ever was a time to describe something as colossal, this was it. The silhouette of the figure in the swirl of dust was tall enough to make me seem like a faerie in comparison—and I had experience in being a faerie.
Two large green lights appeared on the silhouette’s head, eyes no doubt, and several other smaller ones lit up all across the body and limbs. As the dust settled, I got my first view of the colossus that appeared: a figure of stone, nearly ninety feet tall, with four massive arms and four gigantic legs, like an enormous stone centaur. Well, a four-armed centaur. Flickering green lights, visible even at this distance, illuminated its joints and blocky face, with a larger one pulsing like a small star set where a belly button would be on a person, and forming a good part of the connection between upright torso supporting the arms and horizontal torso supported by the legs. I managed a quick Inspect.
Sar’Glagalth, Guardian of Stone, Destroyer of Nations (Lv ???)
Mana: ∞
Hostile
“Run!” Abandoning her usual opening phase, Sunrise Sparkle flitted off faster than the eye could track. For someone who hadn’t ever been more than a few feet away from me after my arrival at the archery range, her departure was significant and her panicked yell maybe more than just a suggestion. The monster, after all, didn’t even have a health bar!
But this was the tutorial; it couldn’t be that hard, right? After all, I had beat the fight earlier. True, that skeleton had almost killed me, but I had still won. There had to be a gimmick to this encounter—we were, hopefully, long past the days when unwinnable fights were considered necessary and used to control the flow of the story. This was VR, not some 16-bit single-player experience!
I narrowed my eyes and considered this Sar’Glagalth. Besides the eyes and the massive orb in its midsection, it was covered with a lot of flickering green lights, seemingly concentrated at joints or presumably “vitals,” though I had my doubts whether a stone monster had a heart, kidneys, or even a brain.
That seemed to suggest that that the green lights were places to target, perhaps the only places that were damageable. When I shifted my focus to one, I found I was able to target it. So … while it was hopefully not an unwinnable fight in the vein of older games, it certainly looked like a multi-target fight.
There were, however, problems—besides the fact that I was about to solo something that looked and was named very much like a high-end raid boss (it couldn’t be, right? This was still the tutorial…).
Problem number one: there were a lot of green lights. Besides the three very obvious high-priority targets of eyes and midsection, each major joint had several lights, and an eight-limbed monster had a lot of joints.
Problem number two: the monster was big. At nearly ninety feet tall, its eyes would be almost completely out of range of Mistshard even if I were standing right at its feet. Likewise, my bow’s effective range was even shorter though its maximum range was longer. In order to fight Sar’Glagalth, I was going to have to get close.
Well, someone with a sword or mace as their primary weapon would have to be even closer. If I had to fall back to my dagger, so would I. However, I was really glad that I didn’t decide to play an unarmed fighter-type. Punching and kicking a giant stone monster seemed, well, not like my idea of an ideal evening, morning, whatever time of day it was now.
As the boss stepped out of the hole from which it had appeared, it tossed a boulder in my direction. One moment, its hands had been empty, the next it was holding a rock that seemed no bigger than a melon in proportion to it. And the next, the rock was arcing in my direction. I was able to get well enough out of the way—it didn’t even really require dodging—but when the boulder landed, it sent out a shockwave that almost knocked me off my feet. Agility score to the rescue!
But that boulder was more than double my height, which meant it was really, really massive. Which meant….
Problem number three: being hit by one of those, and it would be game over. Well, figuratively, but I highly doubted 60-something Health and 17-or-so Defense could withstand being squashed by a boulder.
As I was contemplating problem number three, another boulder came sailing my way. This looked like it was going to be an encounter that required constant movement. I got out of the way, in part by moving closer, and began my attack with a couple Mistshards targeted toward two different glowing green spots on on the boss’s front right leg, below the knee.
I wasn’t going to aim higher just yet, not until I got closer. This certainly wasn’t the time to be pulling rusty algebra skills to the forefront and using Pythagoras to calculate distances. Until I got quite a bit closer, knee-high was about as high up the monster as I was likely able to hit.
Brand-new bow in hand, I zig-zagged as I tried to get closer without presenting an easy target for a giant stone to land atop my head. The first Mistshard hit shortly before the second was halfway to its target, that ten-second cooldown meant they had to be staggered, and I was able to see that my guess had been correct. A health bar for the green glow appeared, and was depleted by around half.
Two shots per target, hopefully, and not two shots with a little left over. But that was still double what would have been ideal. Well, as ideal as this fight was going to get, anyway. Another way of saying two Mistshards per green glow was to say ten mana per green glow. I had all of 31 mana, which had seemed like a lot when fighting the rats. However, I wasn’t likely to get a chance to sit down and meditate in the middle of this fight. I sent a third Mistshard at a third glow even as I considered my options.
I could, maybe, take down three glows before I ran out of mana, six if an arrow and a spell together was sufficient (meaning … if my aim was good enough, while moving, to hit what I was aiming at!). I did have some mana potions—draughts, if I recalled their names properly—but even the couple I started with and the handful or so more than I had gained as loot didn’t seem like an adequate amount.
I considered my new bow for a second. I was only going to get thirty shots whether I used the enchantment on it or not—and whether they hit where I was aiming or not—but this definitely seemed like one of those occasions where using up cooldowns was warranted. I’d just have to hope that this was the last fight for the tutorial (really, that skeleton had been hard enough to have been the last fight in any sane world!) and that I would be able to buy arrows once I arrived in the main gameworld.
Still moving forward—and zigging again quite a bit to the left as another boulder landed where I would have been if I had kept following zigging left with zagging right—I traced a few of the symbols with my fingertip, somehow knowing that was the activation sequence for the bow’s enchantment. The runes and script and symbols flared to life and wrapped the bow with a cerulean glow.
By now I was close enough that maybe I could aim higher. That big green glow at the midsection was a tempting target because if I concentrated on the little glows, I’d run out of resources too quickly. After all, a quick count as I was approaching showed at least four groups of three green glows on the nearest leg, and I had to assume that there were at least some on the backsides of the legs. Sixteen, twenty, twenty-four, something like that per leg … when I’ll be lucky to manage taking down six glows without needing to drink a potion.
There was also the not-so-insignificant consideration that a bigger target would be harder to miss.
With that in mind, I slowed a little, drew and nocked an arrow, and aimed high. When the ghostly lights of the skill guide had me aim even higher, so that the point of the arrow was aimed higher than the top of the glow, I winced a little and complied.
SWOOSH—the arrow leapt from the bowstring, and was wreathed in a blue glow as it flew in a high arc up, up, up, slowing, then down, down, speeding down, looking like the skill guide’s suggestion for my aim was good when….
One of the boss’s four arms swung in front of itself like a shield, and blocked the arrow. Instead of the streak of blue hitting the target, it bounced of the stone of the arm and dissipated.
“D***!” I wasn’t normally a cussing person, but some situations just plain screamed for expletives. When the follow-on Mistshard met a similar fate, brushed out of the air by another of the monster’s four arms, the imbued arrow wasn’t the only thing turning the air blue!
This was going to be a battle of attrition; I just had to hope that I didn’t get attritted before Sar’Glagalth did, but it wasn’t looking good.
Since attacking the obvious primary target was out of the question for now, I returned my focus to the leg I had already damaged. Three of the glows—two at the ankle and one at the knee—had been hit, depleting them halfway, so I aimed much lower and sent an arrow streaking toward one of them, immediately following it with a Mistshard directed to a yet-untouched, knee-high glow.
When the arrow hit, its blue glow pulsed into the green of the target point, washing it away with a burst of water. One down and umpteen many to go….
But the battle changed. With a target taken out instead of merely hit, Sar’Glagalth reared back and roared. The shockwave from the sheer air pressure of that much noise nearly bowled me over, and my health bar took a few points of damage—from sound alone. My ears were ringing and I nearly didn’t notice when both its forelegs stomped back into the ground, sending out a rumbling tremor that did knock me flat. Rather than struggle to my feet, I rolled quickly to the side and kept rolling…. Just in time! Another of those unreasonably massive boulders crashed into where I had fallen, and would have obliterated me had I not moved.
I kept rolling, and it was either the grace period of the tutorial or a quality of the quiver, but none of the arrows spilled out as I did so. I did get another Mistshard flying at a pristine glow, my last spell for my current mana bar, before I got to my feet—just in time to jump and tumble out of the way as a massive stone fist came crashing into where I would have landed if I had kept rolling.
I fumbled around in my inventory for a “Basic Mana Draught,” and got one of the “(Tutorial)” tagged potions first. It turned out to be a a glass vial shaped like a chemistry beaker and capped with a cork. The liquid inside was an unsettling, vivid blue.
And the potion was revolting; it smelled like mud and tasted like a really strong mint mouthwash mixed into flat root beer—and mint with root beer is a horrid combination as I accidentally discovered a few years back after buying Girl Scout cookies. Thin Mint cookies and root beer floats don’t make for a good dessert combination! Hopefully non-starting potions wouldn’t be quite so bad. There certainly would be a market for alchemists who could control the flavor of their creations.
But, disgusting as the potion was, it did what it needed to. With my mouth still tingling with the potion’s aftertaste, my mana bar was immediately filled.
Between arrows, spells, potions, and a heck of a lot of avoiding boulders, attempting to avoid stomp-induced shockwaves, and staying way-the-heck out of the way of fist strikes, I was able to extinguish most of the glowing spots on the one leg I had been attacking. A few arrows missed, and a few boulders almost didn’t miss, but the next time Sar’Glagalth reared back, that leg hung limply, and the resultant shockwave was uneven and less damaging.
However, just as I was congratulating myself on a working strategy, the battle shifted into another phase, perhaps prompted by the limb being disabled. Huge chunks of the earth rose behind the boss and started whirling around it, breaking into smaller and smaller sections until there was a dizzying spiral of small and medium stones orbiting its body at a distance of….
Whoa! One nearly hit me, and then another did. And another. That hurt! Between the little bit of damage I had taken with each roar or shockwave and the impact of those two stones, I was nearly half-dead, with my health bar showing 32 points remaining. Even as a third hit, dropping me to 27 health, I was scurrying backward out of the range they revolved at.
Problem number whatever-I-was-up-to-now: I was still going to have to get up close in order to realistically target the arms, and that whirling, spiraling barrier of flying stones would make it difficult if not impossible. It certainly would make it painful. Not to mention, would arrows and the spell make it through, or would they get knocked aside by stones on an intercept course. That dratted stone monster didn’t even need to use its arms to block attacks now!
Moreover, I distinctly remembered that Inspect had shown an infinite mana bar. That meant it could keep summoning and lobbing those boulder and keep maintaining the whirling stones in the barrier and keep doing whatever else took mana, perhaps the roars and stomps, and add new tricks to the mix, too. Unless the ability had a duration and cooldown, which I couldn’t afford to just wait around and watch for, then this phase of the fight was likely to be close on to impossible.
But I had already come this far; I wasn’t about to turn tail and run yet. This monster might do what the skeleton mage had almost done—take me down—but I wasn’t going to go down without a fight.
I took stock of my options. Twelve arrows, three more mana draughts, five healing potions—no four now, and blech!, that tasted like wet dog smelled, but I was back up to full health in a flash—and not a lot of anything else that might be useful. The ring, but Sar’Glagalth was almost certainly a boss monster, and one use of the Limited Wish could “instantly defeat one non-boss opponent.”
My skills weren’t going to be much more help than they already were. Spellcasting and Archery were gaining experience from this battle, as was Dodge—to a degree. But Gathering, Stealth, and Meditation weren’t helping other than the point of Brilliance that I had gained from Gathering leveling up before. I did still have an unselected skill, but while I could take a moment to review my available options, the middle of a boss fight didn’t offer time to peruse the list of all the skills and choose one that suited me.
I dodged out of the way of yet another lobbed boulder—I really should time the interval between them—and spared one last glance at my character sheet, hoping for something to jump out at me.
And there it was: I had a racial ability I hadn’t used yet.