SpeedRunner (Tower of Babel Book 1) Page 6

  “You have to have something!” Cayden insisted.

  "We just got here, maybe three hours ago. We're on vacation. Just thought we'd stop in and try the game. I didn't; we didn't think."

  Leeeeeroy Jenkins. Cayden realized. These were the same three guys who had logged in alongside him. One of them, likely Daddy himself, had probably just run into the mobs thinking he was invincible.

  “Shouldn't you have some?!” Immolatus insisted.

  "I'm solo; they wouldn't do me much good." Came his weak reply. He really should have, if he'd been thinking clearly instead of being so damn pleased with himself for how well he'd routed the opening levels. "Check the bodies; maybe we'll find something.

  Twenty HP remained on John3's bar as they began their search, then fifteen as crystal after crystal turned up nothing but Zeni and trash. With ten HP to go, they'd checked the crystals of all of the immediate fallen. Immolatus started running for the distant shaman, but neither Cayden nor Daddy made any attempt to help him. Even on the off chance that he found something, he wouldn't get back in time.

  Five HP.

  Four HP.

  Three HP.

  Two.

  One.

  John3's body flared with a column of golden light. It swirled around him for a moment, enveloping the downed frame of the thief. The bulk of the light emanated from the now golden wounds on the Rogue's body, pouring out of him until there was nothing but a cocoon of light surrounding him. The sphere of light began to levitate, wobbling as if a little uncertain about its destination, then rocketed off in the direction of the Crown City.

  Neither Cayden nor Daddy spoke, but Immolatus screamed. It was a scream of loss the likes of which Cayden had never heard and never wished to hear again.

  They all knew what had happened, it was stated explicitly in the terms and conditions. Player Characters who lose all of their HP enter into bleedout. They are granted an extra 100 HP and are ignored by monsters. They are, however, still subject to damage such as AOE, and they lose 1 HP every second. If they are healed above 100 HP at any point, they are returned to the nearest safe zone and suffer heavy penalties for the following seven days.

  If they aren't healed, then they die.

  Around now, John3's body should be arriving at the temple of the Great Emperor in the crown city. His actual cause of death, as with all Player Characters, would be a combination of a cerebral hemorrhage and a massive heart attack. The designer was at least benevolent enough to be sure that dead players left pristine corpses.

  “I'm sorry...” Cayden whispered after a long moment with nothing more than Immolatus' sobs filling the silence.

  “It isn't your fault.” QwazyDaddy replied with what conviction he could muster. “If you hadn't come along we'd probably all have died fighting to protect David. We bit off more than we could chew.”

  “How?”

  “Does it matter?” The other man snapped. Exhaustion seemed to have overtaken him, and he let the greatsword fall to the ground, the enormous clatter matched only by the sound of its owner joining it.

  “No, I guess not." Cayden sighed. “Do you want me to stick around, help you gu-”

  “You've done enough.” The interruption was sharp but not angry. “We're not far from the road. We'll get there, follow it down to the Crown City, collect our friend and go. I think I've had enough of this game.”

  Cayden wanted to say more, but the expression on Qwazy's face gave him pause. He wasn't one of them, and while his intervention was appreciated, he was a stranger here in the midst of their grief. He should go.

  With leaden arms, he retrieved his shield and stowed it along with his weapon in his pack. He was about done fighting for the day. The road was his destination, and to make for it he had to pass by Immolatus. The mageling, so powerful in battle a minute ago was curled in a ball, his body wracked with sobs. Sympathy slowed Cayden as he passed the man, but he restrained himself from reaching out to offer a hand, instead saying simply. "I'm sorry about your friend."

  “My friend? My friend?! That was my father!”

  Cayden was taken aback, both by the vitriol and by the youthful face from which it was slung. Immolatus couldn't have been more than a year Cayden's senior; a broad-shouldered thick-necked brute of a man who looked totally at odds in the robes of a pyromancer now that Cayden was close enough to observe him. A football player cosplaying as a nerd, one currently looking like he desperately wanted to shove Cayden into a locker.

  "None of this would have happened if you had just let us run. He'd have gotten away!" The young man continued, spittle assaulting Cayden as much as enraged words. There was a rage in his eyes that bordered on insanity, enough to force Cayden a step back as the young man took a tighter grip on the staff in his left hand.

  "David, that is enough!" Daddy interjected.

  "But he-"

  "Saved your life. And mine." The older man said sternly, "I've already lost your father today, please don't make this any worse."

  The fury in David's eyes sputtered, then died as he looked to the other man. Even if he thought he'd have been able to kill an injured Cayden, he wouldn't be able to do it if his ally was willing to side with a stranger over him.

  "You think you're sorry now?" Immolatus spat, climbing from the dirt and pacing past Cayden with nothing more than a harsh whisper left in his wake. "Just wait. You will be."

  Chapter Five

  The entrance to the dungeon was over ten miles from the battle on the ridgeline, which gave Cayden plenty of time to recriminate. Alternately walking and sprinting to train the latter as a skill, he kept largely to the road even though a straight shot through the hillside would have cut the travel time nearly in half. It wasn't that he was afraid of the floor mobs if anything the last few hours had shown he was tremendously capable of exterminating them. He was simply too lost in his head, and that never paired well with fighting for your life.

  What could I have done differently? That was the idea he kept coming back to. If he'd committed to the fight earlier instead of weighing his options, would that have made the difference? What if he'd instructed Immolatus to assist the rogue instead of shouting for his help. But without Immolatus' magic to AOE the goblins, would any of them have made it out?

  He couldn't unsee the look on the young man's face. Deep blue eyes ringed a bloody red, filled with grief and pain and hate. It was hard to blame him. Even if the rage was misplaced, Cayden had lived a privileged life; he hadn't even seen the family dog when she passed away. He couldn't begin to imagine trying to stand by, knowing that his father's life was measured in ticks off a hitpoint bar.

  If I hadn't shown up when I did, it would have been his father watching him. Or worse yet, all of them bleeding out together. Some of the sheen had certainly worn off the tower, but while Cayden was indeed shaken, he was unbowed. The game wasn't going to vanish if he ran home with his tail between his legs after the first bad thing that happened, and unwary tourists were going to continue to use it as a safari without having spent the first minute of research to know what they were doing.

  Damage done, suck it up buttercup.

  He still had a little more than a mile to go to the entrance to the floor dungeon, so he decided to occupy his mind by trying to get his run back on track. First order of business, dealing with the flood of alert notifications that had been trying to draw his attention for the better part of the last two hours.

  Level Up!

  You have (5) Undistributed Stat Points

  Skill Level Up: Southern Cross

  Type: Active Combat Skill

  Skill Level: Novice Level 2. 1% to next level.

  Effect: Swing twice in rapid succession. 55% increased damage on each attack.

  Cost: 150 TP

  Skill Level Up: Grasp the Earth

  Type: Stance (Self) [Earth]

  Skill Level: Novice Level 2. 7% to Next Level

  Effect: 410% HP recovery per second. Critical block enabled. Skill ends if the user
moves more than five feet from the original location.

  Cost: 100 TP. 5 TP per second.

  Achievement Unlocked

  Reach Level 2

  Only one hundred and ninety-eight to go!

  Cayden pulled out of his notifications menu and entered his Player Info screen. He was greeted with fanfare, the directional mikes at the rear of his glasses chiming in musically to compliment the simulated swirl of light around his paper doll. The light show continued moving, racing across his display to run circles around the glowing red button labeled 'level up' just in case he was an idiot who'd somehow missed the initial notification. Also, he had notifications for the eighteen goblins they'd looted. The system had collected all the money automatically, but he'd left behind anything that took up bag space. Fortunately a swift glance through what he missed told him what he already knew, it was almost all trash that wouldn't be missed, particularly in light of his already crammed bag space. Still, nearly 300 Zeni was nothing to shake a stick at.

  A tap of the virtual screen brought forth a familiar menu, the class select screen from hours earlier. Babel was somewhat unique among MMO style games (apart from the whole 'existing in reality' thing) in the way it's level structure worked. While most games had you select a character class at the beginning, be it Mage, Hunter, Warrior or whatever else, and locked you into that forever, Babel allowed players to select a new class at every level. If anything, it was more akin to the leveling system used in tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons than anything electronic.

  As before he had his pick of hundreds of possible classes. Some were grayed out in their submenus by dint of his absurdly low Intelligence score, but they were not the only ones unavailable.

  Babel used a three-tiered system. Primary classes, such as Guardian, Knight, Thief and so forth were available right from the get-go, provided you had the proper base stats and these had a level cap of 100.

  Advanced classes were similar to Primary classes, but had both high stat and skill requirements. Immolation mages, for example, were an Advanced Class that specialized even further in fire related skills than the basic pyromancer. They required both high energy, as well as high skill levels in spells from the pyromancer and mage base classes. Their level cap was 50, but the skills and level up bonuses of the classes were correspondingly higher as well.

  Renown classes were something entirely different. Every Renown class had its core requirements in stats and skills, but in addition to those basics, each required one or more specialized achievement to unlock it. Some were simple; the Beastslayer class only required that players have the Beastslayer achievement, earned by killing 10,000 Beast class mobs. Others were nearly unique, such as the World Champion class, which required the player become champion in the once annual Grand Emperor's tournament in the Summer Palace on floor 37, an achievement held by only two current players. The level cap for Renown Classes was 25, and they were arguably more powerful than advanced classes, but even more specialized in their particular field.

  There was no hard limit on the number of classes a player could take. From a practical sense, most players tended to stick to no more than two or three as they leveled, anything more risked delaying access to Advanced and Renown classes, and correspondingly weaker level ups.

  Cayden highlighted Guardian at the top of the page where it had been placed for easy access and clicked through the series of pop-ups and warnings to confirm his choice. His planned build required at least fifty levels in Guardian for access to certain high-level skills that would lead to his advanced class of choice, so he might as well get started on them while the getting was good.

  You have reached Guardian Level 2

  +40 HP

  +20 TP

  New Skill Learned!

  Leap Attack

  Type: Active Combat Skill

  Skill Level: Novice Level 1

  Effect: Jump up to 30 Yards in any direction, taking no falling damage on landing. Make one attack on landing for 100% bonus damage.

  Cooldown: 15 Seconds.

  Cost: 200 TP.

  Leap attack was arguably one of the most important skills for Cayden's early build. At 200 TP it was, on its face, less useful than either of his other two attack skills. More resource intensive than Southern Cross while dealing less damage, and lacking the stunning effect of Shield Bash, at first glance, it was a bit of a loser. But looks were deceiving.

  For one thing, it was useful for entering combat in a hurry, something he'd sorely needed not that long ago. It was also equally useful for getting out of combat in a pinch. A thirty-yard jump that only increased with level up would put substantial distance between himself, and a would-be attacker. It was also capable of totally eliminate falling damage if the user 'jumped' at the ground while falling, almost certainly a glitch, though a welcome one. The added mobility of the jumps could allow him to circumvent certain area mechanics and sequence break a surprising number of dungeons. It would even serve as a bit of a speed boost compared to only sprinting out of combat, though at a 200 point cost to his pride if anyone saw him doing it.

  The biggest advantage, however, had nothing to do with what was written in the stat block, and everything to do with how it leveled up.

  Most skills in Babel were categorized by type. Travel, Passive, Combat and so forth. Some skills, like Sprint, could be leveled at any point simply by performing them. Others, particularly combat skills, could only be leveled when used in actual combat against enemies within five levels of the player. No sitting there swinging at air or whacking at a training dummy to level Southern Cross or casting spells at an archery target to level firebolt.

  Leap attack, on the other hand...

  He wasn't sure if it was bugged or simply an oversight. Perhaps the developer had intended Leap Attack to be used as a travel skill, so he wanted it to level up through use. Or maybe the falling damage glitch was the least of Leap Attack's errors. Either way, the result was the same. Leap Attack was a combat skill that could be leveled outside of combat. And that made it incredible.

  A glance at his map told Cayden that he was getting close to the dungeon entrance, which meant he'd need to finish up the bookkeeping. Ironically, the dungeon itself should be safer than the road leading to it, but he didn't feel like pressing his luck any further this evening. Best to give it his undivided attention.

  The small crosses next to each of Cayden's stat-points glowed a dark blue as he surveyed them. No point in wasting anything in Energy quite yet, best to keep focusing on what he was good at. A point in Strength, two in Dexterity and two in Vitality to round it out. He committed the point and surveyed his character sheet with a smile.

  Name: Cayden

  Gender: Male

  Bloodline: Agares-Tabbris

  Class: Guardian 2

  Experience: 1142

  Next Level: 3000

  Strength:13

  Dexterity: 17

  Vitality: 18

  Energy: 1

  Stat Points Remaining: 0

  Max HP: 1260

  HP Recovery: 3.2/Second

  Max MP: 10

  MP Recovery: 0.2/Second

  Max TP: 880

  TP Recovery: 4.8/Second

  He pushed his menus away and smiled. Just ahead he could see the mouth of the floor dungeon gaping out of the side of a cliff face. It was not exactly inconspicuous, nor inviting, the gaping maw of a three hundred foot stone dragon's head that rested along two massive claws. It looked like the mountain had fallen from the sky, somehow crushing and petrifying the dragon in its moment of rage and agony.

  The dungeon was meant to be found. The only way to progress from floor to floor, not a single one had been meaningfully hidden. Even the perpetual fog on the 23rd floor had done little to conceal the floor's dungeon, in part because every dungeon has a paved road that took a roundabout journey from floor entrance to floor exit.

  It was also guarded. Two identically armed and armored men flanked either side of the massive entr
yway, their hand's loosely gripping pikes as they examined Cayden. Their equipment was expensive low level rares, each man wearing thousands of zeni in plate and chain armor. Woe be to the mob that decided to mess with these two.

  "Skill Use: Observe." The one on the left said with bored, casual ease. He wasn't speaking to Cayden, wasn't even looking at Cayden so much as he was looking past him to an AR field filled with information. It was a bit uncouth to use the observation skill on a player without permission, but neither of these men was here to be polite. Simply from the way the two carried themselves Cayden would have guessed private military experience or perhaps policing, even if he wasn't already sure of that

  They were corporate goons. These two, in particular, were in the employ of CGS, one of the largest demi-metal distributors in the world. At least, he thought they were, judging by the company logo emblazoned on their tabards.

  The various mining and farming corporations had hundreds of such men in their employ, hired muscle to protect their profit-making interests within the tower. These were part of a rotating group of guards tasked with keeping the dungeons of the first five levels clear for travelers at all times.

  The PR reason was to encourage development, travel, and safety of the earliest floors. The real reason was that they had to.

  For an individual, traveling between floors was easy and comparatively inexpensive. Each floor had at least one teleportation gate that permitted access to any floor the player was attuned to at a middling cost. But those gates only allowed for personal travel. Trying to move thousands of tons of demi-metals, alchemy components or other resources to the first floor where they could be processed and shipped out into the real world simply wasn't cost feasible with the bag space available to even high-level players. To send it in bulk they needed to go the long way, and going the long way meant keeping the dungeons clear.