Soulstone: Awakening: A LitRPG novel (World of Ruul Book 1) Read online

  Fear shot through me as I processed her words. I hadn’t heard anything. Still, I wasn’t going to ask “hear what?” because as soon as I did a giant face-eating monster was going to come lurching forward. No, I didn’t hear anything at all.

  “We’re getting close, I can feel it,” George said, and from the sound of it, he was fairly close. It almost sounded like he was behind Dark Heart. Lame. Had Crash seriously let the bunny go first?

  “Good,” I mumbled and turned my attention back to the tunnel. As I mustered more effort and slithered forward like a snake, I heard what she’d been talking about. It wasn’t loud and sounded far off, but there was no mistaking that there was something out there.

  Scritch.

  Scratch.

  Scritch.

  My heart leapt into my throat as I froze mid-crawl. Only that didn’t do anything because the sound was getting closer. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!

  “Get away!” I cried, firing an energy bolt down the tunnel. Blue magic leapt from my fingers and tore through the darkness, briefly illuminating the glinting, emerald shell of something coming forward through the darkness.

  “What’s going on?” Dark Heart called as I launched another bolt of magic down the tunnel, this time aiming for the spot where I’d seen the shell. My blast not only struck empty stone, but it failed to illuminate the creature. Maybe it’d gone?

  “I’m not sure,” I said, taking a deep breath in an effort to be still my beating heart. This wasn’t real. None of it was real. I just needed to get through this. I pulled myself forward, and as I did, a scorpion the size of a small poodle leapt from the darkness like an Alien face hugger.

  A wordless scream erupted from the creature as its stinger came lashing through the air. I screamed back as I tried to move my head out of the way. The creature’s tail whipped by me, missing my left cheek by millimeters as its bulk slammed into my shoulder. Pain shot through me as its many legs skittered across my armor as it spun to face me, claws clacking.

  I reached back, trying to bat it away, but the scorpion was so heavy, its weight practically forced my shoulder into the tunnel. Consequently, my fingers missed the creature as it jabbed at my hand with its stinger.

  “Eat magic!” I cried, maneuvering to blast it as it drove its stinger into my shoulder. Thankfully, my leather coat and chainmail kept me from getting pierced like a balloon, but my lack of mobility also caused my energy bolt to slam uselessly into the ceiling. Bits of rock and debris rained down on me as I shifted, trying to roll over.

  As I flopped onto my back, the damned thing managed to scrabble across me so it wound up standing on my chest. Its claws clacked ominously as it raised its stinger once again. Another cry erupted from my lips as I tried to smack it, but before I reached it, the stinger struck. White hot pain erupted from my right hand and my health bar dropped and turned green.

  “You have been poisoned,” Elizabeth said in a seductive voice that was not at all conducive to the situation. “You will receive ten damage every second for the next sixty seconds.” A quick bit of math told me that would be enough to kill me something like four times. Awesome.

  Since I didn’t have the Cure spell, I might be able to stop it with a potion, but what happened if I got poisoned again? No, I had to stop it before I could cure myself.

  I jerked my hand backward with the scorpion still embedded in my flesh. Pain shot through me as I flung my hand to and fro while screaming in a very manly way. Thankfully, the creature was whipped backward across the tunnel.

  “Aaron, what’s going on?” Two’ Manchu yelled as I rolled back over on my stomach and looked for the monster. I didn’t see the scorpion, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. No, it was out there in the darkness, and it was waiting.

  “I just got poisoned by a giant scorpion,” I growled, forcing myself to move forward. As I did, the cone of light from my spell spilled over the creature. Green ichor dripped from the stump of its tail where it looked like part of its stinger had been ripped off. A quick glance at my hand revealed why. The tip was still stuck in the back of my hand.

  Part of me wanted to pull it out, but I didn’t. I could deal with that later.

  “Cure!” Dark Heart yelled, and I felt a wave of magic wash over me, and as it did, my health bar turned back to normal.

  “Thanks!” I said as the scorpion lunged for me with its claws. As it did, I swiped at it, but missed as it landed right in front of me.

  It attacked, rushing forward to gouge me with its claws, so I did the only thing I could, I raised my head, allowing the snapping pincers to pass beneath my chin before throwing myself forward and dropping my chin down hard on the creature’s back.

  My chin slammed into its carapace, pinning it to the tunnel floor beneath me. Its tail lashed out, but without the stinger, all it did was smack painfully into my cheek and smear me with its blood. Neither of those things reduced my health.

  Taking advantage of its situation, I grabbed it by the tail with my right hand and slammed it into the wall of the tunnel. The creature hit the stone with a splat that stunned but didn’t kill it. So what did I do? I blasted it in the face with magic.

  As light exploded from my hand, an arc of blue energy leapt from my fingers and turned the offending creature into a burst of multi-colored shards. Only, instead of evaporating into the ether, they melded into the floor. The smell of burning plastic filled my nose as the ground in front of me glowed neon green for a second.

  “Kneel before Kahn, bitch!” I cried, raising my fist in triumph while shielding my eyes from the glare with my other hand.

  “Good job, buddy!” George said from behind me as the glow faded to reveal a hole in the ground that led to some kind of chamber. I couldn’t see into it because of my light spell didn’t penetrate the murky darkness well, but I was done being in this tunnel. If I could get out through the hole, I was going to do it.

  “There’ some kind of hole where it’s body was. I’m going to go down there and take a look,” I said, moving forward to examine the manhole-cover-sized hole in the ground. “You guys can come or wait for more scorpions.”

  “I’m coming, boss. Now get a move on before more come,” George said as I gripped the edge of the hole and peered down inside.

  I’ll be honest, I had no idea if there were more scorpions or where the scorpion I’d fought had come from, but if we were being honest, I didn’t care. I just wanted not to have to fight them flat on my stomach if I could help it.

  “You don’t have to tell me twice,” I said, scrabbling forward into the hole with as much haste as I could. I know, I was probably going toward more monsters, but at the same time at least I’d face them in a room where I could utilize my combat abilities.

  30

  As I dropped through the hole the scorpion had melted into the ground and landed on the floor of the room below, my eyes widened in shock, and I swallowed hard because it was made from solid gold. Glittering heaps of silver, platinum, and gemstones the size of basketballs glinted in the torchlight for what seemed like miles in every direction.

  “Holy crap!” I cried, elation filling my voice as I watched the firelight cast by the torches mounted to carved marble pillars throughout the room dance across nearly endless treasure. There was so much of it, I had the sudden urge to dive into it like I was Scrooge McDuck, only this would make his money pit seem like a pauper’s piggy bank.

  “What’d you find?” Dark Heart called to me as I took a tentative step forward. Something crunched beneath my boot, and as I raised my foot to see what it was, I saw diamonds the size of my thumbnail scattered across the gilded tile.

  “Endless wealth,” I said, hardly able to believe it. “I think I found endless wealth.”

  My entire body was shaking with nearly insatiable greed as my eyes roamed across the mounds of treasure. Practically everything inside me screamed for me to start grabbing handfuls and shove it into my pockets until I couldn’t move anymore. I wasn’t sure how much th
at was, but I was damned sure going to find out.

  “What are you talking about?” Dark Heart said right before she dropped through the hole and landed next to me. Her eyes opened as wide as saucers as she turned in a slow circle. “Oh.”

  “Oh?” I asked, turning toward her and raising an eyebrow in her direction. “We pretty much hit the motherlode and all you say is ‘oh?’”

  “It’s obviously a trap,” she replied, sadness filling her voice as she tore her gaze from an emerald the side of her head and turned toward me. “Haven’t you seen like any movie ever? Indiana Jones? Aladdin?”

  “Um… yeah. I’d thought about using my Detect Lesser Traps skill, but I’m worried it’s not powerful enough to detect them here.” I sighed as my stomach clenched in despair. She was likely right. No one would leave a room full of treasure just lying around. Either we were about to get eaten by Smaug from the Hobbit or touching the gold would turn everything to lava.

  “I can tell by the look on your face that you agree with me,” she said, smirking at me. “I almost feel like I should take a picture so I can treasure the memory.”

  “So you can remember being right?” I asked, and she nodded as the others dropped into the room beside us. “Is this seriously the thing you want to be right about? That we can’t take the treasure?”

  “It’s not like it’s real treasure.” She rolled her eyes at me like her answer was in any way helpful. It sort of reminded me of the way my ex would say “food” when I asked her what she wanted to eat.

  “We need to get out of here right now,” Crash said, casting a wistful glance back toward the hole we’d come from. “Like right now, right now.”

  “Why?” Two’ Manchu said, turning to look at the priest. “It’s just treasure.”

  “Yeah, I’m with Tubby over there,” George added, sniffing at a pile of rubies. “It doesn’t smell like sulfur or anything, so what’s the rush?”

  Crash shook his head dismissively as he picked his way through the piles of gold, silver, and jewels while taking extra special care not to touch anything. After he’d moved about ten feet, he stopped and knelt down beside an opal the size of a football.

  “See this?” He pointed at the opal. Golden light flickered across its surface like little flames, and as I nodded, he continued. “That’s a white dragon’s egg.”

  “Oh, no,” Dark Heart said, moving forward to get a better look at the egg. “There’s no way there could be a white dragon’s egg here. It’s way too low level an area for something like that to be here.”

  “Yeah, great, take that up with the developer,” Crash said, getting to his feet. “Either way, we should get out of here because there’s only two things that have dragon’s eggs. Dragons or things that can kill dragons.”

  A chill went down my spine and my gut clenched in fear as Crash’s words sank in. We were inside something’s horde, and a thing with a horde like this was definitely not to be fucked with. Worse, even if we didn’t piss off the owner, we had no way of knowing if the place was booby trapped.

  “Okay, how do we get out of here?” I asked, wiping my sweaty palms on my pants as I followed the path through the mounds of gold in the other direction. I didn’t see any way out, and with every second here, I was getting more on edge. Being here was bad. Really bad.

  “You know, it could just be a treasure room for us to find,” Two’ Manchu said, pointing at the hole in the rock above. “I mean, we only fell in here because Kahn broke through the tunnel. That can’t exactly be common.”

  “That’s even worse,” Dark Heart said, moving up beside me and looking around for an exit, but like me, it appeared she’d found none. “Because that means there’s no obvious way out.”

  “Yeah, well,” Two’ Manchu said, kneeling down and examining a chunk of silver the size of my fist. “How do we know we can’t take some?” He pointed at the silver. “It’s probably worth a try.”

  “Look, bro, we can take whatever you want once we find a way out.” Crash put a hand on the barbarian’s shoulder. “Because if touching that turns the room to acid or something, I’d like to know how to run away first. After we find the exit, you can stuff your greedy pockets while I watch from a safe distance.”

  “Fair enough,” Two’ Manchu said, getting to his feet. “So how do we find the exit?” He turned to look at Crash. “You ever design a room like this?”

  “No.” A haggard look crossed Crash’s face as he emphatically shook his head. “I don’t even recall it from the notes, but to be fair a lot of cool stuff like this.” He gestured to the room. “Doesn’t translate well into gaming. People just want mobs and item drops. Traps get put on gaming sites ten seconds after their figured out, so adding complex ones isn’t a good use of time. Even if we’d seen something like this in the notes, there’s no way we’d have spent resources mocking it up.” He shook his head. “Players say they want a sandbox, but in the end, they don’t. They’d much rather fall into a room filled with mobs, kill them, and move on to get more loot.”

  “Wait, what do you mean by that?” I asked, moving toward him. “You mean there’s a lot of puzzles you guys just dropped?”

  While I wanted to find a way out of here as quickly as possible, something told me Crash could be helpful, but not in the way he thought. He’d helped mold what they knew about the maelstrom into a game, but that also meant a lot of stuff probably got left on the cutting room floor because it didn’t fit into game design. That stuff might help us though.

  “Yeah, but not just puzzles. Skills and stuff too. Take the classes for instance,” Crash replied, a smile flitting across his face as he stared up at the ceiling like he was recalling a fond memory. “We were given a huge list of skills, but not all of them were optimal. Some were downright terrible, and some were way overpowered when combined with other skills, like Body to Soul. It made the idea of policing the game mechanics too hard. So what we did was we sort of took all the skills and built them into classes because at the end of the day, leveling your skills matters, and having level ten Power Strike is way better than having a hundred level one skills you don’t use.”

  “So, if I’m hearing you correctly, you purposely took away the skill learning like it is here and made predefined classes for game balance?” I asked, raising an eyebrow at him. “Were there really that many subpar skills and such?”

  “Yes and no. We found synergistic skills and linked them into cookie cutter classes for the most part while trying to keep certain skill combos apart because they were too overpowered.” He shrugged as we began moving forward along the path because we had nowhere else to go. “Honestly, aside from a few OP combinations we absolutely took out, the classes we created in TG represented exactly what you’d want at high level play.”

  “How so?” I asked, watching him. “Isn’t it better to learn lots of skills? I know on my rogue I’d have killed for some warrior and paladin skills.”

  “You think that, but it’s actually suboptimal to go that route unless you’re made of time.” He gestured at me. “Right now you know Charge and Blade Rush, but unless you’re out of mana, using Blade Rush is always better for you because you’ve raised Blade Rush to a higher level.” He looked at me. “Sure you can bend some of the skills here like using two-handed skills one-handed, but ideally, sticking to a set of skills and leveling them as high as you can will make those skills more powerful, and the more powerful they are, the better they become. It creates a loop where you’d stop using lower level skills anyway just because it would be a waste of time and energy.”

  “That makes sense,” I said, sighing as I rubbed my face. “You had a team of guys create the classes by optimizing skills sets that, when leveled to max, would be not only balanced, but work the best synergistically and cut all the others because no one would want to use their lower level skills.”

  “Exactly.” Crash tapped his forehead. “We actually spent a ridiculously long time on it. We had a couple AI systems that just mocked up sk
ill combos. Trust me when I say this, barring a few over-powered exceptions we purposely ignored, the TG builds are the best ones you could use.”

  “So, instead of learning all the skills we can, we should be sticking close to the optimized rotation of Titan Gate?” Two’ Manchu asked, looking at Crash. “Because if that’s true, maybe you’re less dumb than you think, Mr. Priest.”

  I was suddenly inclined to agree. Most of the skills in the various Titan Gate classes worked fairly well together, like my Kidney Shot to Revering Vendetta combo, and the higher level those skills became the stronger those combos would be so sticking to our roles made a certain amount of sense.

  “With a few notable exceptions, yes.” As Crash said it, he broke into a wide grin. “Except we should learn the combos of skills we deemed too broken to use like Heal and Body to Soul.” His grin grew wider and he clapped his hands together. “And I know exactly what they are.”

  “Um… that’s great and all,” Dark Heart said, pushing past us to point at something in the distance. “But what the fuck is that?”

  As I turned to see what she was pointing at, the blood drained from my face. I hadn’t noticed it before, probably because I’d been too distracted by what Crash had told me, but that we’d moved closer to the far wall, I realized it was covered with scorpions incredibly similar to the one I’d fought in the tunnel above.

  “Are those bugs scurrying across the wall?” Two’ Manchu asked, his voice barely a squeak as he took a step back and bumped into me.

  “No, scorpions aren’t bugs,” Crash said, shaking his head as we stared at a sixty foot wide wall. “They’re arachnids.”

  “Dude, stop being pedantic!” Two’ Manchu growled, glaring at Crash like it would somehow make the wall of giant scorpions vanish. “They’re fucking bugs.”

  “So, uh, let’s try the other direction. Maybe there’s an exit somewhere else,” I said, and as I started to turn to head back the other way, Dark Heart grabbed my wrist.