image [https://i.imgur.com/zr59OP5.jpg]
Eyes fixed on the polished obsidian ceiling, I battled the divine monk. The whistle of Morph’s staff readied me for incoming attacks. The sounds of scratching grit beneath his feet matched the reflection’s movements.
Neither of us battled with passion. Morph fought under the weight of obedience. I attacked with a detached liberation.
My interface flickered with tempting updates, but I ignored them. Watching the mirror, I filtered out sensations that did not belong to my feet and sword hand. Gladdy’s weight, momentum, and balance consumed my awareness. I felt the fine layer of grit along the pool’s bottom as I calculated regular withdrawing maneuvers. My robe didn’t itch. I felt no sweat chilling my skin. Armor didn’t shift or sway from sudden movements—I existed only in my weapon and boots.
I took no chances, jabbing and lunging whenever Morph couldn’t block or parry. Every 30 seconds, I applied another Aim, Thrust, and Bleed, never wavering my focus on my opponent’s posture. By the end of the fourth minute, Morph fell below half of his health pool.
We circled the pool, with Morph constantly advancing and me continually withdrawing. It took over eight minutes of perfect execution to bring down my foe, but I lasted long enough to drop him.
Morph’s body hit the ground only moments before my own. Like demons I’d fought before, his corpse faded into nothingness.
I chased my victory with an immediate Rest and Mend. Paying little heed to game updates, I watched the plinth in the mirror for respawning monks. Instead of a monk, an idol appeared in the reflection.
Before investigating, I regained my health. It took a few moments to shake myself out of my meditative state. As my heart slowed, I waited for my health to max out at 250. Watching the ceiling, I leaned on my elbows and read the combat log. Aside from my attacks, crits, and Bleeds, nothing transpired. Morph had missed me over 100 times.
I studied the end of the battle.
/Morph misses you.
/Morph takes 6 Bleed damage.
/You hit Morph for 74 damage (8 resisted).
/Morph misses you.
/You critically hit Morph for 160 damage (0 resisted).
/Morph misses you.
/You critically hit Morph for 156 damage (0 resisted).
/Morph dies.
It delighted me to see combat end on a double crit, a token justification for spending a power point on Aim. I watched the reflection, but nothing respawned.
Then I spotted the idol’s other half in the reflection at the edge of the basin where I’d left it. After getting up, I walked to the side and reached for the idol. Though I felt cold stone, I saw nothing but empty air. I reached my hand out and tilted it toward me, prepared to catch the invisible burden.
I cradled it in my arms and carried it across the basin to the pool’s central island. After lifting it to the plinth and shifting it into the correct position.
The idol’s reflection disappeared, yet no magic phased me back to Miros.
I grunted and crossed my arms, wondering how long it would take for Toadkiller to get his comeuppance. I grinned at the irony of him telling Duchess that waiting was the hardest part.
My wait wasn’t long. My interface pinged with a contest alert.
Congratulations!
2 Players Remaining
You have reached a milestone in The Great RPG Contest!
Contestants participating in Crimson Software’s The Book of Dungeons Closed Beta 0.71b will no longer be able to communicate using the Great RPG Contest Chat Channel.
Good luck!
And I thought I’d figured out this screwy situation. As far as I knew, none of the players were close together—how had two people been knocked out?
The contest’s chat window showed communications that must have happened prior to slaying Morph. I read what I’d missed during the melee.
Duchess If you’ve sent me any mail since my last letter, I haven’t gotten it. There’s no post out here. I know I said I was going quiet, but this is taking a lot longer than I thought. Is there anything wrong?
Toadkiller There must be, but we have to wait it out.
Duchess Okay. I’m going quiet again.
Toadkiller I honestly don’t know what’s happening. It’s up to you if you want to move forward.
Duchess Dark’s in Suza.
Toadkiller Be careful what you say. This a group chat. Don’t give away your position.
Duchess That’s just it—he’s seen me already and doesn’t care. And I’ve been watching him for a while, too. This is taking too long. I’m going in—wish me luck.
Toadkiller Popcorn ready. Go get ‘em, girl!
Duchess Seriously, Dark, how are you doing this?
Toadkiller What’s going on?
Duchess I don’t know. He’s gotta have a speed hack.
Toadkiller Check for buffs. What spells is he using?
Duchess That’s just it. It’s not spells or blessings or powers. He’s dodged before I attacked, so I couldn’t hit him. I took off but don’t know if he’s chasing me.
Toadkiller Hang tight, girl. I’m coming down.
Duchess It looks like he’s followed me.
Toadkiller Are you still in Chapel Hill?
Duchess leaves channel.
Toadkiller I guess that means congratulations to us for making the final three. Where are you, Dark? Let’s do this. Apache, are you there? How have you survived? I don’t get this. Where did you guys go?
Toadkiller leaves channel.
The drawn-out conversation made me wonder if more time-dilation wackery was at play.
It seemed as if Darkstep had killed them, but opening the contest’s leaderboard cast doubt on that conclusion.
Remaining Players
Apache – level 32, 0 knockouts
Darkstep – level 11, 2 knockouts
The first detail that caught my attention was my level change—I was no longer level 31. As much as that changed things, the information about Darkstep surprised me even more.
When Crimson introduced the leaderboard, I thought it was the weakest interface feature of the contest. But now, it conveyed vital intel about my opponent.
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Darkstep gaining only one more knockout meant Morphren had quickly gotten his due against Toadkiller.
Darkstep’s knockout came from Duchess, although it looked as if she’d not gone down quietly. She’d taken a bite out of him, costing seven levels. Darkstep been level 18 before.
What kind of item could take away seven levels? And if he’d killed her, it meant Darkstep now wielded it.
But it seemed improbable that Darkstep had Duchess battled precisely at the same time I fought Morph.
I expected things would simplify with fewer opponents, but events suggested otherwise.
My remaining update echoed the pleasant news of a level gain.
Congratulations!
You are level 32
You have gained a level. You have increased your agility by 1, intelligence by 1, and willpower by 1. You have received 1 power point. You have 8,029/8,450 experience points toward level 33.
When I checked the combat log after killing Morph, it reported no experience gain. Now it showed another line. Perhaps it worked like the demons. The game hadn’t given us experience points until we gave them the warlock’s body. The Book of Dungeons must have rewarded me only after Morphren ended his respawn cycle by killing his old master.
/Morph dies.
/You gain 956 experience points.
Killing a deity rewarded more experience than I’d received from the ward worm, yet at level 31, it amounted to only a single-level gain. Thoughts on how to spend my new power point raised the issue of magic—how could I un-Banish myself without magic?
Restoring Morphren to his old self had knocked Toadkiller out of the game, but it hadn’t removed this debuff. While reaching the final two in the contest, smiting deities, and gaining levels warmed my soul, none of it solved my dilemma of shaking this excommunication.
The debuff remained in my peripheral vision.
Debuff
Banished
You are out of phase.
Duration
Until you rephase to Miros.
Was this permanent? How was I supposed to phase back to Miros? I couldn’t Counterspell the effect, because that’s not how Counterspell worked. Even if it did, the debuff prevented me from casting it.
I checked my equipment, but none of my equipment showed magical properties.
Toadkiller mentioned Dispel Magic, but that itself was a spell. Even with an infinite amount of time, Banishment prevented me from spamming spells to unlock new powers.
Worse yet, Darkstep still had all his powers. Even at level 11, he possessed enough magic items to pose a danger.
I could hit for 70 damage in a foreign settlement—and I could crit for 160. Perhaps it was possible to knock out a level 11 draped in powerful equipment. The idea buoyed my confidence.
Duchess claimed Darkstep could see the future, but Time Stop trumped that power. I could double-Time Stop with my robe, Slipstream behind him, and backstab at least twice. With Aggression, I could finish a level 11 opponent before he could predict anything.
But none of that mattered until I figured out how to get back Time Stop and my other spells.
But Banishment worked both ways. Even if my opponent carried a bunch of magic items, they couldn’t affect me because of my immunity to magic. Darkstep could cast all the illusions and Fireballs he wanted—none of them could harm someone out of phase.
Then I remembered what I’d been doing before Morph attacked me. I’d been checking my inventory for food. Without my Circle of Temperance working, I couldn’t just outwait my opponent.
Without magic, time was no longer on my side.
It wasn’t clear that Darkstep and I could see or harm one another. Toadkiller, Phren, and Ostrabog disappeared when I got Banished. If that meant I couldn’t see other players, that presented another set of challenges.
Without a body to loot, there seemed no reason to hang about. I wanted to see if leaving Morphren’s Sanctuary would rid me of Banishment.
A quick search of the pedestal revealed no idols or objects, invisible, immaterial, or otherwise.
I recalled Darkstep’s closing words in his letter. “In your moment of imminent doom, look up for salvation.” While he’d written it in the same stodgy diction that he used in the contest chat channel, his advice rang with truth. To defeat Morph, I needed to see his reflection.
To knock out Toadkiller, Darkstep had barely given me everything I needed to know. Facing an opponent with such precise knowledge of the future unnerved me.
I reluctantly gathered the glow stones into their bag. “At least you guys are nonmagical.” Lighting conditions dimmed as I plopped them into the bag.
As I collected the glow stones, I caught a glimmer of light off of Mendacium. The pearl pendent bore no description, rendering it even more useless. But the purple item had done its job. It tricked Toadkiller to Banish me instead of letting his demon kill me.
Somehow, Darkstep knew I could defeat Morph without using magic. Mendacium and my melee skills had worked for my rival as much as they did for me. Toadkiller’s pet demon and deity no longer posed a danger to either of us.
I looked for Toadkiller’s gear but didn’t see it anywhere in the sanctuary. It seems he’d put some distance between him and Morphren before the deity caught up with him.
I sheathed my inactive sword in its scabbard and double-fisted glow stones. Retracing my steps, I used its warm amber light to guide my way out of the cathedral and the dungeon’s lower levels. When I reached the burned-out dining hall in the chapter house, I looked upward at the open roof that had collapsed from arson so many years ago.
The roof opened to a bright blue of nothingness. The sky held no clouds, moons, stars, or sun. Only then did I realize how removed I’d become.
The same emptiness rained in from every window. My first sight of the horizon showed no atmospheric perspective in the distance. Location names changed on my map interface as I left, going from Chapter House to Refectory to Calefactory to Narthex.
Jiaolong didn’t greet me at the entrance. And at no point did my equipment return to normal as I left the sanctuary.
Nearby bushes, trees, and grass blurred in my vision as if a great filter obscured my vision of greenery—and yet the stone walls and fortifications remained in focus.
Being out of phase with the world meant things were going to be strange until I figured out how to rid myself of this Banished condition.
In terms of The Great RPG Contest, Darkstep shared the same debuff. If he and I couldn’t interact, neither of us could win the game. And if Duchess was right about him using a speed hack or cheat, I might have won this game by disqualification. I doubted her conclusion. In a game that played with time dilation, speed hacks were relative. Darkstep might have slowed her down with a debuff, and she might not have realized it.
When I passed the destroyed gatehouse door and rounded the walls, I caught sight of the horizon.
The aerocline had disappeared.
Blyeheath’s rugged terrain stretched beneath the mesa. No fog blocked my view of buttes, pillars, mesas, ravines—I could now see everything previously hidden by the thick atmosphere.
The land looked like pictures of the South Dakota Badlands with patches of scrubland. As I studied the landscape, I realized how quiet it had become. At this elevation, the wind usually howled in my ears, but I heard nothing and felt no breeze on my face. More than anything, the alien silence bothered me.
What was going on? Was the aerocline still there and invisible, or had Miros changed?
The aerocline was tomorrow’s issue.
My immediate hurdle involved getting out of this mesa up to Oxum’s level. The sheer face of a cliff leading up to a wooden platform loomed over me. Villagers had defaced the bluff, chiseling away its features to prevent quarantined inmates from escaping. The walls offered no accessible cracks or fissures to climb.
As I retrieved a grappling hook from my inventory, a single active power called attention to itself. Hot Air wasn’t a spell, so it didn’t rely on magic. The blessing came from Forren, who hasn’t forsaken me despite my Banished state.
On the other hand, it made no sense that Hot Air worked. I’d used it this morning to avoid the zombie stampede. It should still be on a daily cooldown.
But what were days without a sun in the sky? I gazed again at the empty void of blue above me. Perhaps the lack of celestial bodies freed me from the daily cooldown limit.
If I could cast Hot Air while Banished from Miros, then my other blessings worked.
If respawning had freed Morphren from this ghostly state, then Holy Smoke could be my key back to Miros. Holy Smoke would let me reconstitute in Forren’s temple. But to invoke the blessing, I needed to be within the boundaries of my old settlement.
Standing alone at the bottom of a cliff wall, I grinned.
Hawkhurst hasn’t seen the last of its old governor.