My maps were all useless. Even ignoring the way the bottom left corner had dissolved into static as a result of some glitch or another, the dungeon itself changed hourly. Straight paths turned into winding bridges before disappearing entirely. This was far worse than the labyrinth of legend. No string nor trail of breadcrumbs could lead me back out, and the minotaurs were without end. They were fodder to me, slow plodding beasts with little intelligence and blatantly obvious attack patterns. Still, I couldn't let down my guard. My build afforded me unparalleled speed and decent attack power even with simple daggers but even with Aquila's choker my durability was barely on par with a level 9 player. If I paused for more than a moment after a slaughter I'd find them before and behind me, their short respawn timers designed to entertain hundreds of dungeon-crawlers now serving to harry me to exhaustion.
When I'd first come through their had been at least some clues to direction. The rock had changed as I'd ascended, both in composition and smoothness. Torch placement and various bits of blood-graffiti had provided hints as to secret rooms and proximity to the boss. Now even that was disappearing. Killing the Taurus King must have triggered a special event. Blood seeped from the ceiling, flowing down until it covered everything in dark ichor. The torches sputtered out one by one until all that remained was darkness and eyes, gleaming red.
The blood slicking between my bare toes felt more real than anything I'd felt previously in this virtual world. The smell of it clung in my nostrils, walls closing in on me in the dark. I could hear splashes as five sets of eyes focused on me. Their unnaturally bright eyes gave silhouettes of the leading figures, clubs splashing forgotten into the blood as they were driven to madness by the death of their God. I screamed in rage at this world, at Kayaba, at myself, but it brought me no release. Muffled by the blood and the roars of the minotaurs there was no satisfying echo or shaking of rock and stone, only the pitiful sound of a terrified girl in the dark.
Kayaba was truly a multi-talented genius. For all that he was one of the most talented VR developers in the world, it was his sadism that he would be remembered for. His appearance in this world as a cruel god born of blood reflected his inner personality perfectly. He had created a game, a world, where there was no physical pain. A world where every player could exceed the limits of humanity. I'd thought it a paradise, an escape from the dull disappointments of life, but it was all tainted. It was a world that attacked the mind and soul rather than the body, driving players to insanity and despair. Even now there were people, real people with real lives committing suicide thanks to this sadistic game. Thanks to my mistakes…
No matter what stood in my way I had to persevere. I couldn't stop until they were safe, until Klein was safe. If I'd taken him with me he wouldn't be risking his life alone against the Boss.
The guilt-driven thoughts swirled through my head until they melded into a cacophonous hum, paradoxically allowing me to focus. I felt my daggers shatter, corroded by the raining blood that covered my body and clouded my eyes. I didn't bother taking out new ones from my supply. I wasn't in the mood.
The splashes alerted me to the first minotaur's proximity. Without opening my eyes I spun past it, moving into a half split to avoid its massive arm. It didn't pass unharmed, my fist striking the back of its neck. Killing the third boss had raised my strength relative to the creature more than I'd thought. My knuckles went straight through its spine, finally stopping at its chin bone (more due to the length of my arms than lack of penetrative power). The feeling was both disturbing and highly unexpected. I could have sworn they didn't have a skeletal system a couple days ago. Was Kayaba still updating the game even during all this?
Cursing Kayaba again I slew the next three minotaurs with ease and wiped the blood out of my eyes. The minimap was the only spot of light in the darkness but it was a small comfort now that it had turned entirely to static. He had time to give random mobs skeletons but he couldn't fix basic elements of the user interface. Well, it wasn't really a surprise that he valued Aincrad more than the people in it.
There was no way to refresh the map now, no way beyond trial and error to find a way out. But if that was all there was, then I'd make the best of it. Enough speed could make up for poor efficiency. Their corpses would be my trail of breadcrumbs.
In the end I found the exit by accident. A 'thief' type player with Searching and Perception talents might have found the labyrinth's exit in minutes but I'd had to resort to just searching every inch of the dungeon as quickly as possible. My Sprint skill and high agility had allowed me to cover countless miles of twisting tunnels, hundreds of minotaurs dying at my hands along the way. And then, when my strength was flagging and I wondered if I'd ever break free of the blood-drenched dungeon, I found the exit through a combination of luck and boundless frustration.
I followed my "key" out of the dungeon. I'd struck the bull-headed mob with the back of my hand so hard that it crashed straight through the false wall, destroying it utterly. The minotaur was little better off than the stone rubble, soon perishing from its broken neck. Like all the other dungeon mobs before it since I'd defeated the boss it dissolved into blood rather than polygons.
The blood didn't seep away but instead stained the grass a red so deep it looked black in the light. It looked discomfortingly out of place compared to the rest of the second floor's pastoral environment. No more so than myself however. Blood dripped from my hair as if I'd just stepped a Satanic shower, drops thick as I blinked them out of my eyes.
I took a breath, hoping for a hint of peace and fresh air after so long underground. I was disappointed. The musky scent of minotaurs still clung to me, cloying and foul. Dimly I remembered the boy's locker room at school being much the same but it had never disgusted me so much as right now. So many days stuck in the dungeon's confines with a virtual nose more sensitive than my real one had eroded my patience.
In a fit of rage and desperation I tore at my blood-drenched clothes, their durability dropping quickly as I ripped them to pieces. Soon I was clad in nothing nothing but the Cloak of Midnight and Aquila's Choker, both items too high level for me to rip apart with my bare hands.
The remaining tatters of clothing on the ground dissolved into smoke as I realized I was hyperventilating. Even knowing what I was doing it was difficult to stop. The choker didn't make things easier, literally feeling like it was choking me as I struggled to slow my breathing. Even attempting to unequip it was useless as the insanely high-level item was so glitched that error messages pinged in front of my eyes every time I tried.
I wondered amidst the panic what my body was doing in the real world. Kayaba had mentioned something about hospitals, hadn't he? I couldn't see or speak or move any limbs in that far-off world where I was still me but I was less sure about breathing. Even now a gaggle of nurses might be gathered around my body wondering why I was hyperventilating and shaking like some scared little girl. I was the hero, the one who was going to save everyone from this cursed death game. I needed to get a grip on myself already!
I grit my teeth and growled, trying to stop my frantic breathing through force of will. Instead I nearly choked. It wasn't until I caught sight of the new label on my cloak that my mind distracted itself enough to calm down.
'Fenrir's Cloak?' The pitch-black cloak was stained a lurid red but unlike the clothes I'd ripped off it was entirely dry. The Cloak of Midnight had absorbed the blood and become something entirely new. As a drop from a field boss it was already a rare item but this hidden item was on a new level. It hadn't been without some negatives. The +20 hiding skill was gone unfortunately but it was doubtful that would be useful anyways in higher floors unless I took the hiding skill. Zero plus twenty was still pretty low afterall. On the plus side the armor rating had moved from +25 to +80, an unheard of rating this early in the game that would likely still be good thirty levels from now. But it was the final modifier that had my min-maxing mind racing.
"Improves senses?" My voice was still a bit breathy but otherwise normal. Well, normal if I was a thirteen-year-old girl, a condition I was resolutely not thinking about.
"It could be a bit more specific." I wondered if the cloak was why the minotaurs' stench affected me so badly. I supposed that was better that than some modifier built into the game that made body odor more repugnant to female avatars.
'Could be useful,' I decided. I didn't know what Fenrir was a reference to but I had a feeling I'd be using their cloak extensively. I might have to stuff my nose if the sense of smell continued being such a pain but an improved sense of hearing could be vital when exploring a dungeon.
Warmth all along my skin had me closing my eyes in a brief moment of peace - at least until I realized why the afternoon sun was getting such good coverage. "Shhhh-" I swallowed the swear even as I closed Fenrir's cloak around my front, a helpful wolf's head clasp helping to hold it shut. "Frikk," I said instead, still uncomfortable about swearing with my sister's voice. It was silly gesture to avoid swearing after accidentally exposing her body on a sunlit field but it was more for my own piece of mind than anything about Suguha at this point.
I resisted the urge to run for cover. No matter what my instincts told me about wide open fields there was no one to see me here. Nothing that wasn't an npc anyways. Running for the trees while dressed in some sort of Little Red Riding Hood cloak would probably just end up triggering some giant wolf monster spawn that I didn't want to deal with right now.
I didn't have much in my inventory. With how quickly I was leveling it mostly wasn't worth the bother of picking things up. There were a few things I'd picked up by accident though when I'd been grabbing dropped daggers. A feathered cap, a fur shirt, a chainmail skirt - hardly the most fashionable or useful items, but still far better than nothing at all. I had to remind myself of that truth repeatedly as I registered how strange the combination of items felt. Virtual bodies shouldn't feel so real. The mismatched clothes were more revealing than I wished they were as well. Starter clothes weren't very protective but I'd appreciated their intentional grey blandness.
'Why am I so worried about this?' Some things about the game were real like the possibility of death, the people in it, but this body wasn't. I needed to remember that. Remember that this was just the vehicle I needed to drive to win the game, no matter the graphics upgrades Kayaba had put out since this started. I still didn't know how a criminal mastermind was getting so much engineering work done while on the run.
There was something else I needed to worry about, I just needed to remember what it was. It was so hard to remember anything when my head hurt so much. Kneeling down on the ground with my head in my hands helped but the spikes in my temples weren't going anywhere. 'I need to sleep.' Even in a virtual world humans weren't supposed to stay up… however long it was I'd been awake now. If I didn't remember to blink occasionally I was even starting to hallucinate that the trees were changing color. Even so something was keeping me awake, an inkling that there was something I desperately needed to remember.
"Illfang!"
I sped off across the field like a dart, hoping I wasn't too late. I couldn't begin to guess how long I'd spent on the journey back through the blood-drenched dungeon but I had a bad feeling I was already too late. It didn't help that I kept taking small detours.
Every time I saw one of the low-leveled minotaurs or angry bulls I just couldn't seem to stop myself. I barely even noticed them in front of me before my fist knocked its way through them. At least they weren't exploding into blood like in the dungeon. I'd thought they were at first but after noticing my clothes were still dry I figured out that was just another hallucination. That didn't mean I should just keep slaughtering them though. I was moving so fast that I could be all the way past them before they even thought of attacking me if I could just restrain myself.
Temptation called only seconds later, and I gave in immediately. The mob split to either side of me as I axe-kicked its ugly face. "Faster." Klein was waiting for me. I hadn't known him very long but right now he was my only friend in Aincrad, the only one who had the barest hint of the person that lay behind my stolen face.
"Faster." Not for the first time did I wonder what life would have been like if I'd been attracted to retro video games that moved the character with a push of a button. It sounded so much easier than this VR nightmare.
'Faster!' It was hard to keep running at maximum speed. It didn't take much mental effort to do it normally, certainly nothing like trying to run this fast in real life, but with my brain already full of holes it was a struggle. It wasn't so much like running through jello as dealing with half-paralyzed limbs. There was a strange disconnect between when I told my limbs to move and when they actually did. It was minute but noticeable. I wished I knew if it was some sort of sync error with the headset or another sign that my brain was turning to mush from too little sleep.
I slowed as I passed the main town of the second floor. Would it be better to turn on the portal to the first floor first? If I was lucky they hadn't entered the dungeon yet and I could stop the whole mess before it started.
An insanely inappropriate giggle burst out of me that refused to stop until I punched myself in the stomach. 'I'm never lucky.' I sped towards the "exit" of the first floor dungeon instead, not wasting time on the portal. My bare feet pushed me along the grass field like a rocket until I practically flew into the cavern's mouth.
I halted atop the stairs that led down to Illfang. Sound was crashing into me like waves from the hectic battle below. I couldn't say for certain that the volume was because of Fenrir's Cloak as this was the first time I'd been in pitched battle with so many players. Well, the first time since the Beta anyways. Regardless, it wasn't doing my headache any good.
I considered taking the cloak off but the armor boost from it was too great to just give up. It might just be the Floor 1 boss but any boss was leagues more tricky than the average mob. Instead with a bit of focus I somehow managed to shove the sound a bit into the background. Now able to think again I took a better look at the battlefield.
It wasn't going well. It was hard to believe that after so much extra practice since I beat Illfang the first time that they weren't even able to beat him as a group. Then again, I couldn't deny that I'd largely beaten him thanks to an AI glitch and knowledge of the beta.
A few of the players had some talent but none appeared particularly high leveled. Exp had to be sparse on the first floor by now with so many people gathered in the same dungeon. It didn't help that most of the better players were tanks, better at taking and blocking damage than dealing it. Grimly I wondered if most of their better damage dealers had died during the first run.
There were more kobolds this time, I noticed. The boss had responded to the large battle group by increasing its kobold spawn rate to match. Every few seconds a squadron of fresh kobolds appeared out of thin air, sometimes even in the blind spots of fighting players. The battle group was holding together for now but they were all downing potions at an alarming rate. If they didn't kill the boss soon it was only a matter of time before someone ran out of healing potions or grew too tired to execute perfect parries.
"Okay Illfang," I whispered, "I guess it's my turn to cut you down again."
Skills:
Sprint lvl 235 (+31% top run speed)
Martial Arts lvl 78
Dagger Mastery lvl 220
Throwing lvl 120
Acrobatics lvl 171
Items:
Bronze throwing needles
Legendary Aquila's choker (+78 armor)
Random daggers
Leather armor
Fenrir's Cloak
Overall level: 23
Agility: 92
Strength: 23
Health: 23 (230 HP, +.7/second (+2.5/sec while resting))