“Good to meet you,” I said, shaking Barry’s hand, at this point in time not knowing I would be forming a friendship with him shortly down the line.
Nor that I would be murdering him in the future, after having gained his full trust and helping him in trying to achieve his own dreams of a better humanity. All that, with a rug pulled out from underneath the feet of his heart.
But that’s not until later, we will get to that.
“Nice meeting you. You said you were a Shade Knight?” Barry continued to smile, looking at me with enthusiastic curiosity. I later understood that he was just excited to learn about other skills and classes, but at the time it felt like he was fishing for information.
“Uh, yeah. It’s only an Epic ranked class though,” I said with a wave. “Nothing like Legendary Tier. What can you do?”
“I got a magical attack skill that puts holy energy into my sword. Oh, and a shield bubble thing!” He seemed to activate his inventory, as a longsword with a golden hilt and glimmering clean blade appeared in his hand.
“Check it out,” he said as his sword’s blade began to glow a faint yellowish gold.
It died away after a second or two, and I could see a bead of sweat on his forehead. Apparently it took a lot out of him to use the skill. Which was true of all of us at that time. Lower level Rift Hunters just weren’t used to mana and the System back then.
“What do you got?”
“Oh nothing as cool as that.” I pulled out my own weapon, showing Barry the rune etched in the metal. “But it’s pretty sweet, right? And I have a skill to target enemies for extra damage.”
“Wow, my sword isn’t magic like that. You must have gotten lucky on the rewards.” He tapped my weapon’s blade with his fingernail and the metal rang faintly.
I stashed it back into my inventory before he could look at it further. If he didn’t get a magic weapon even from having done well enough to get a Legendary Class, then showing it off might have been a little too much. Maybe I shouldn’t have revealed it to Lucilla either? I didn’t know, but hopefully that wouldn’t come back to bite me.
“Wanna try sparring sometime? I think that will help me get better at using my sword.” He was walking back toward the couches now, and I found myself following him.
The guy’s easy going sort of attitude was charming, magnetic even. A guy like myself, admittedly extra paranoid and massively motivated to stay off all radars, was still pulled towards having Barry like me.
“Yeah that’d be fun. I noticed the System was helping me learn to use a sword while I was in the tutorial. Must be some kind of extra feature, to help us adapt to the dungeons?” I took a seat on one of the couches as Barry had also sat down on the other.
He nodded and tilted his head in thought. “Must be. You think that—”
“Attention, all personnel to the main lobby immediately. No exceptions.” Sinclair’s voice suddenly blared into the room from the intercoms that hung near the ceiling at random intervals.
“Looks like the day isn’t over after all,” I groaned.
“They gonna have us do some kind of group test?” Barry asked.
“No idea. But let’s go find out.”
“That one is definitely different than the tutorial portal!” I yelled out over the whirring helicopter blades as we were flown into the rolling, craggy hillside.
From hundreds of feet up, we could already see the glittering portal that hovered in the area. Unlike the previous rift I had gone into—which was white—this rift looked like it was a dark blue, nearly cobalt.
The strange obsidian platform underneath it was also a bit larger than the white portal from the forest. It was maybe ten feet in diameter instead of seven or eight from the previous. Besides those two facts, this rift was the same, even if it felt far different.
The little gathering that Lucilla announced, once everyone had been gathered back at the facility, was for this new dungeon rift that had been discovered. Up until that point, only the white tutorial rifts had been found, excluding the giant red one out over the Atlantic which the world’s governments had so far failed to begin fucking around with. This was the first non-tutorial rift that the government had stumbled across.
And now, they wanted myself and a few other lab rats from the cheese-cave crew to go in.
We weren’t the first people they had tried sending through, of course. The military had tried throwing a sacrificial military squad inside before they ever called Lucilla and her experiment group. But surprise, fucking surprise, the System had stopped them from going in.
The blue portals couldn’t be entered by people who didn’t already have classes. In other words; only people who had already gone through a tutorial dungeon. Thus, why they had called on us.
“It says only six people can go in,” Nieve said to Lucilla with a clipped tone.
I had been surprised to see the burly colonel at the location. I had figured after the incident at the first white tutorial rift, he would have been canned, or pulled back to administration duty.
So I didn’t know who’s butthole he had to lick, or whose balls he had in a vice in the military chain of command to be still jumping around in charge of finding more rifts. Whatever the answer was, as my status of Private Lab-rat, I wouldn’t be told the details anyway.
“Only six?” Lucilla repeated and looked over at us. She had brought twelve of us, and now was told that was double what the rift would accept. Her eyes roamed over the ground and I could see her brain clicking away to decide who went in from the light in her eyes.
“Schilling, Dupree, Pierce, Vasquez, Norton, Huwett, you six will go in,” she called out.
We all stepped forward and looked over at each other. Schilling and Dupree made sense to me as people to pick. Barry was the only one with a Legendary Class, and Francis Dupree was the most experienced in practicing his skills, other than myself.
Vasquez was a rather skinny man in his thirties, and his class was some sort of magic caster class that focused on elemental skills and spells. I didn’t know all the details, as I wasn’t really a part of the magic testing.
Norton was a bit of a fake-out in terms of appearance. He was a big guy, wide at the shoulders and six foot four, making him look like a serious melee tank.
He was a healer class, Devote Channeler, or something like that.
Huwett was a ranged fighter, the only one in the six of us that were picked. She used some kind of bow, but it looked oddly constructed, angled in a way that when she held it up it appeared to be a sick love child between a short bow and a crossbow. Whatever the fuck it was, I had seen her nail a target with it from fifty feet away without much effort on a daily basis back in the testing facility.
I wasn’t worried that she’d end up accidentally shooting me in the back, at the very least.
So a Paladin, a Rage Warrior, a Ranged DPS, a Healer, and a Caster. Lucilla was building up the roster like a videogame party, which was rather smart on her part. I hadn’t gauged how much of the situation she was grasping during our small “talks” the last few days.
Now, I started to realize that the woman was picking up the System and its intentions rather aptly.
But that still left the question; why did she pick me?
I wasn’t complaining, let’s be real. I actually wanted inside that Dungeon Rift, for a long laundry list of reasons that I won’t bother throwing at you right now.
But they were reasons that I don’t think Lucilla herself was considering, because almost all of them were selfish on my part. Including things like loot, titles and experience progression that I had my eyes on.
No, she wasn’t doing me a favor and putting me on the team because she was my friend. So why was she?
I could speculate as to what she was thinking. That she secretly knew I was lying and holding back my full capabilities and thus wanted the strongest person on the team? Unlikely.
That she was able to intuit my calm, focused, and analytical behaviour and figured I would be able to keep the team in line and on course? Maybe. It was possible.
There was also the chance that she fucking hated my guts and was hoping I would go in there and get ripped to shreds by some sort of troll monster.
If I was a betting man, I’d have put money on that last option.
None of that truly mattered though. We had the team and we were going in.
Colonel Nieve ordered a few soldiers to bring some supplies, backpacks with food, water, some basic medical packs, as well as some clothes and, surprisingly enough, weapons and armor.
It was all mundane basic things. Ballistic helmets and vests. Combat boots and black fatigues. Gloves, elbow and kneepads, things of that sort, along with knives and police batons. The military had already figured out that any advanced technology was rendered useless inside rifts. But physical material still remained, meaning all those items were ones we could use.
Packs were divided up between Schilling, Dupree and Norton, all the largest guys, or the ones with the highest strength stats. At least those they believed to have the highest strength stats, especially since I was still lying about what my true stats were.
I only changed my clothes, putting on the offered all-black fatigues, which fit rather well all things considered. A belt and vest went along with them, and I was set from there.
“Once we are in, we got to be ready for an ambush right away, “ Vasquez said as we geared up. “Happened to my group in the Tutorial dungeon.”
“Same here,” I said.
“Then keep focused, but don’t just start attacking. We don’t know if we will be placed together or not, so you might start off throwing spells at an ally,” Norton clarified.
“True, be cautious,” Barry said.
We all nodded to each other before we stepped up to the edge of the obsidian platform. There were a few final glances to each other, before we all moved together, stepping up toward the rippling, deep ocean-blue rift.
The same flash of light flooded my vision the moment my foot hit the black platform, and I quickly found myself standing in a bare white room with rows and rows of white columns that rose up into nothingness.
I spun around, finding the same thing in every direction.
[ Dungeon Pre-Entry Room Loading… Stand By]
The notification flashed across my vision for a moment before everything stuttered and I found myself in a dark stone chamber. It was wide, and tall, the ceiling and sides going off into shadowy darkness in all directions except one. A set of three steps led to a raised area in front of me which contained a stone platform the size of a table set into a dark stone back wall.
I saw a shimmer of light that floated over the platform but I was hesitant to actually approach it.
Gamer knowledge and experience told me not to simply rush the strange floating magic thing unless I wanted to succumb to a painful and agonizing fucking death. I didn’t know what it would do, but I imagined something turning my insides into molten metal, or my bones into pudding, hell maybe even having my skin transformed into cheese.
I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to find out.
[Pre-Entry Room Loaded.
Dungeon Shop Access Granted.
Additional Options allowed based on planet’s initiation phase status…
Additional Options allowed based on Titles…
Additional Options allowed based on Class…
Continue to the Dungeon when you are ready]
That was a lot all at once.
I surmised that the room I found myself in was a staging area before entering the dungeon proper. Maybe a place where I set my inventory, or choose some buffs or options later. I wasn’t sure of the exact scope of the room, but I figured I would be able to understand it all in due time.
The fact I got extra options because of my class and planet status was nice, and I didn’t expect to have extra options because of my titles. I brought up my status screen and looked back at my titles just to confirm.
[Pioneer - Grants enhanced weapon, item and armor options in the Dungeon Pre-Entry room.
Death Harbinger - Grants enhanced weapon, item and armor options in the Dungeon Pre-Entry room.
Heir to Death - Grants enhanced weapon, item and armor options in the Dungeon Pre-Entry room. Grants access to Sponsor during Pre-Entry… ???]
“Access to Sponsor? And even more questions mark after that? What the fuck?”
All the secret spy stuff the System was doing was annoying. I could guess some things, as it all fit basic game logic, or at least stemmed off from game logic that I understood.
The table and glittering light I saw on the platform was probably an interface of some sort where I could buy things with the currency that I had been earning; the copper and silver credits. Even with the inventory system, none of us were able to pull out actual coins or anything from the inventory, it just showed the values.
But I’d have bet my entire private room back at the facility that they were used with the System, as a shop or among other entities inside the Dungeons. And it looked like the Pre-Entry area was where that would happen.
“Yet still,” I muttered to myself, “what the fuck is a Sponsor?”
“That would be me.”
I looked up from my screen in shock at the sudden voice. Up on the platform, which was completely empty except for the table seconds before, now stood a person.
She wore a black hooded cloak, underneath which was a tight and form fitting set of lavish, gold adorned, black robes with long sleeves. The bottom of the robes had seams cut all the way to her hip on each side, giving ample view of her long legs. Black heels finished the outfit and she held a large wicked looking scythe in her hands.
Her face was just as pale as the rest of her, with deep black eyes, and long flowing straight black hair that disappeared in her hood.
She was… beautiful, strikingly so.
I stepped back, swiping away my screens and conjuring the runic sword from my inventory into my hand.
“Who— who the fuck are you?”
She grinned ever so slightly at my question, staring directly into my eyes the entire time. She didn’t acknowledge the sword in my hand, or the aggressive stance I was taking.
“I have been called many things, across many eons. But most entities have the same name for me,” she said. “You call me, Death.”
1.08 Call Me Death Mommy