Crevice in the shade...
The haptic suit was actually hurting now. The wounds burned against the open air, and the loose chunks of shrapnel and shards of stone that had scattered back into the small hide-away. It was pulling him out of the experience. It should have been a battle. Someone should have come by at this point.
He shrugged his shoulders, and shook loose dust and exhaustion. With a will of their own his feet and hands dragged him from his hovel, and he grabbed his blade. It found himself fixed firmly between his ribs and into his lungs and heart. It was a singular, careful incision. His health point indicator dropped sharply. The scent tower in the corner of his room showed him the richness and redness that was blood. His own blood. When he wrenched the blade up, it carved through his form. The pinching and pain brought deep by the blade and the haptic suit faded as his favorite red text brought itself across his screen. A rich, vibrant, crisp image. It meant home to him. His investment in that tournament had been minimal anyhow.
Kirt knocked his visor up and tugged at the zipper of the haptic suit. He had cracked his system so that he could walk away when he needed to. By the time he had returned from his exodus into sunlight, he’d be back at his version of Firelink Shrine. His default spawn location. His, as he saw it, home away from flesh and blood.
Carefully, he waited for the dizziness to fade away. His head ached a bit, and he swayed. Rather than fall, he caught himself on his dresser. After it passed, he continued into the hallway. His hands traced the walls of his home, dragging along the moulding around the doors as he passed. When he finally met his stairs, he walked down them. His younger brother, now seventeen, was watching television on the coach with his Sanctuary gear and haptic gloves to the side. The news was on. A pair of anchors were babbling about some incident downtown.
“
Hey. You alright?”
“Yeah.
“
Cool. Mom home from the store yet?”
“Yeah. She’s working in the garage.”
“
Rad. Tell her I got water and I love her.”
“Will do.”
Kirt drifted off at that. To the fridge. He hoped quietly that his father had filled the fridge sometime recently. Being a content developer for the Sanctuary was a good gig, sure, but it often kept him out of the house pulling long nights. Designing video game content had become harder since the Sanctuary. Less video games and more culture being introduced. Professional content designers were fading more rapidly as well due in large part to the ease of access into the occupation. Connections got him a corporate content design job, however. Kept him and the family stable and awake.
He got a water bottle from the fridge and stepped away, leaning over the nearby coach to watch the news with his brother. He watched carefully as the Old Man In Red appeared. He decided immediately that Omir was one of the content developers or a lead content developer with Sanctuary’s ownership company. Or some similarly important figure. The speech ended, and he walked up stairs.
“
Watch Twitter and Facebook and what have you. Call Dad and Mom if it turns out to be true. Text Dad now, make sure he heard. I’m gonna go run Darksouls offline. Don’t worry about me. Come tell me what’s up if you spot anything odd.” He was lying. He didn’t play Dark Souls offline. Ever.
Stepping back into his room, a veritable mess of toys, figurines, and various brands of Sanctuary interface gear. His chair sat open, and the scent tower was putting out old stone and grass. That was suggestive of Firelink. As suggestive of it as possible.
There were implications that Kirt, soon again to be Yolo Of Londor, didn’t like about this supposed techno-organic thing. How did it infect people through the game, for one. Didn’t seem scientifically sound. Something like a scent tower could do it, but as far as he knew most people didn’t play with scent towers because of where they landed on the
financial burden side of things. Construct the pathogen inside the scent tower. It was more or less a chemical manufacturing tool, wasn’t it? That seemed the most likely thing. He walked over to it, and unplugged it from the wall. Once he figured out a potential cause other than it, he’d plug it back in. For now he’d search his favorite invasion locations for an example of one of these infected things.
Yolo woke up with a close friend placing a gentle, warm hand on the cold shoulder that belonged to him. It was an NPC, yes, but he couldn’t help but feel a connection to it. They were exceptionally designed machines. They rarely repeated answers. It was good to have something that felt so attached to his favorite world.
“Hello? You alright, friend?”
The withering old pilgrim glanced over Firelink. It was Firelink Classic. He preferred it to the Firelink present in the third Souls game. Regardless, the pyromancer would have been there. There was something about the way he talked. A cadence to it. An honesty. An altogether genuine personality. He was mandatory to any run. Even the speed runs that would have forgone him completely. As far as the Pilgrim was concerned.
“
Excellent, Laurentius. Just broke from a particularly souring invasion. Dozens of fools clustered together fighting along a ridge. Myself among the, but I’d been disarmed. A ponce was using some old Velkan sorcery that was putting spells out completely. Dreadful. I used a black soapstone to make myself scarce.” He pivoted, using his sword to help support the massive weight on his back. It was difficult to move with it. But move he did. Carefully.
“Oh. Well, remember to be safe, friend. Do you need pyromancies?”
“
No. Good bye, Laurentius, my friend. Don’t you dare go Hollow.” Laurentius nodded and smiled. Once the Pilgrim Yolo had turned his head, Laurentius went idle. NPCs were never perfect. These were old ones. He didn’t expect much from any of them. Laurentius still made the old Hollow smile, though.
Old Hollow. It was odd that Yolo Of Londor called himself that. He always did enjoy putting himself into the game as fully as possible.
Quelaag shuddered, and the chaotic energies pouring out of every wound and orifice burned at the fading corpse. The Soul counter in Yolo’s bottom right vision began to tick up the valid 60,000 point reward. His screen ignited in the golden, “
You Won,” text that he dreaded so harshly. No challenge. He was hit once during the encounter, and it barely shaved a sixth off of his health bar. Each of his strikes was worth dozens of Quelaag’s own, considering how solid his defenses were and how thorough his offensive was. The result was a board grunt. He turned around and dug around in his bag. After a moment of searching his inventory, which appeared to him as a well organized rucksack that slung over his side, he found his Mound-maker trinket and equipped it. Then, he retrieved his Red Eye Orb.
Invasions were what motivated him most greatly. They always presented some kind of challenge. Backstab fishers, parry fishers. All of them were challenges to some extent. Pyromancers were his favorite to face, sorcerers his least. They all still brought him pleasure through the challenges that they represented.
Once he activated the orb, his session began searching. Invasion orbs worked slightly differently when used from within a Dark Souls session. They kept you within a Dark Souls game and tossed you into a leveled session specifically to ensure a fair challenge. This one did just that. The Mound-maker artifact he was wearing just made PvP easier for him in Dark Souls, allowing him to target both helper phantoms and physical players for a chance to gain rewards. When the brief loading screen flashed by, he was in upper Blight Town standing on a bridge in a key part of the zone, by the only reliable Bonfire respawn point.
He hated running this zone on his own, but he enjoyed killing others in the zone. That was his plan for today. His target’s name flashed across his view. “Sk88rh8r,” had a phantom with him, indicated by the accompanying, “Kill Sk88rh8r or 1 summoned phantom,” text. When his view was completely clear, he was able to get a good look at his surroundings. A blue phantom was leaned against a wall while a rather bloated and disgusting looking Host clawed at him. The blue phantom was an ally, so none of the Host’s attacks were interacting. A red phantom was standing by the bonfire, staying just at a safe distance. They were talking, and Yolo had arrived in the middle of a conversation. He caught the tail end.
Blue was speaking first. “
Yeah. He hasn’t stopped since I was summoned.”
Red next. “
And he’s torn up three others? Just with his hands like that?”
“
Right. I haven’t had to lift a finger, but it also isn’t sending me home. I think he must have cracked some knuckles before going down into Blight Town. I swear a guy is hiding around somewhere.”
“
So do you wanna help me kill him? If you grab him with your hands it might enable collision and I should be able to backstab him and give you time to retreat and draw your weapon.”
None of these three people that maintained their sanity had ever played HALO before. They didn’t recognize the Flood infection. It looked natural in the world of Dark Souls. It seemed more to be some sort of hidden artifact item than anything else. It put their guards down. They forgot about the transmission that had been blasted out to each of them.
“Hello, you three. I’m Yolo Of Londor. Might I provide aid of some sorts? If this fool is as attacking his own Blue sentinel then I’d say we take him down with quickness.”
The pair looked up, taking their focus off of the infected player. His avatar’s fingernails were scraping against the wall, and the sound was dreadful. A constant snapping and drawing and bending and scraping. Chalkboard had nothing on this disgusting creature. It was dreadful in just about every possible meaning of the word. It held Yolo’s attention for a moment. By the time his head was clear, his new allies were nodding and readying their maneuver. The red phantom drew a chaos-infused dagger and equipped an artifact called the Hornet Ring. He stood close behind the finicky infected, while the blue phantom set his hands forward in the air, over the infected’s shoulders.
“
Why the hell not. You only live once, right?” Blue was dressed in Darkwraith armor, so his smile and chuckle was mostly inferred based on the way he shifted and moved, and the accompanying laughter. Red, who was wearing Farron Knight armor, nodded affirmatively and quietly. Yolo stepped closer and held his sword above his head, while he prepared to quickly cast affinity as a follow up.
Blue brought his hands down onto the infected host’s shoulders, and collision enabled. Immediately Blue began to scream in a rather unholy manner as the player ripped into him. The feedback on the haptic gear would have resulted in a similar startled shreek, but the cause to this particular one was the physical shock of the virus being introduced into Blue’s physical system. Red moved quick, stepping forward to stab the creature in the back. The resulting damage was minimal, and the normal backstab mechanics for this worldspace didn’t kick in. Instead, the creature flung a bloated arm against red. He grunted as his head struck stone. The flood infected player turned his attention, in a panicked rage, towards Yolo. Before it had an opportunity to enact a full lunge, he had knocked it downwards with a stroke by The Long Crusade. It did little against the creature. When affinity kicked in, it was slightly more effective. The barrage of eight humanity-sprites staggered the creature through pure numbers.
Blue was panting, and took the opportunity to cycle through his inventory and draw a weapon. A Bloodlust katana. From the Mound-makers covenant. Coincidence is fruitful. Blue read through its item description, and as he felt the physical twitches set his ingame and real-world movements off-kilter, he drew it from his inventory. Once in his hand, he tossed it directly into the infected player. It slid through, creating a strong wound and lodging itself in. The resulting animal sounds from the infected creature were unsettling. Yolo stepped back, spacing himself out from the temporarily dazed creature. Blue was twitching and losing control, and similar growths were sprouting from his wounds. Red stood and produced his Farron Knight Greatsword and its accompanying dagger. With ferocity, he lunged forward. The technique for the weapon was fluid and wild. Artful and untamed. It represented well the Undead Legion’s attitude towards the Abyss. It was useless. Rather than executing an excellent and dangerous maneuver, he was grabbed mid-air by the creature he hadn’t even the chance to dig his dagger into the ground so that he might redirect his momentum into a powerful blow. Red’s neck was held tight by a bloated and warped hand. He was struggling to breath. Instead of swearing or grumbling in anger, he gagged. To Yolo, this only indicated a high quality haptic suit. It was the virus again, though. Lacerations on the avatar’s neck was allowing the infection to enter uninhibited.
Yolo took the opportunity to lunge forward for the Bloodlust in the Flood infected player’s back. It seemed to have actually harmed it. It was the only blade that caused a wound, anyhow. He grabbed it by the hilt, and pressed it deeper. He had to put his back into it right proper to avoid the crushing weight of his Pilgrim’s Burden. It was dreadfully annoying but it was important for his total comfort in the world. It was a situation like this where he needed all of his hands that made things hard. Normally in combat he would scramble along the ground and perform heavily defended strikes or cast affinity from the safety of his Burden, but today he was forced on a heavy offensive. The blade slid deeper as he leaned against the flooded player, and slid cleanly upwards and outwards as he sliced a massive gash through the player. Whatever the weapon’s special property was, it was effective. The creature fell to its knees as its right shoulder fell away into a mass of gore and flesh. Dark Souls had no qualms with letting players see something of such a nature. Yolo was both proud of the work, and a little disturbed. The Kirt behind the visor was a little disturbed. But he was Yolo at the moment, so he was proud as the zero-health creature faded away. Large text flashed across the screen. Golden. It made him proud this time.
“Host Destroyed, Returning Home.”
Blue was now standing, covered in a similar mass of viscera and growths as the host. He was making garbled animal sounds, again like the host. Yolo gave him no time to adjust, and simply cut a red-thin line from left shoulder to right pelvic bone. Red lunged next, receiving similar treatment.
“Sorry, my fellow Hollows. Hopefully that stuff will get off your avatars once this odd event passess. Your vertebra shackles will be well kept. Toodles.”
They screeched as they dissolved into mist. Then, Yolo did as well when he was returned to his own session. Death had looked him in the eyes and offered him a simple, “I’m coming for you,” and he had ignored the threat and instead appreciated the sword.
“Anti-Viral. Does that mean anything to you, Laurentius?”
"No, friend."
"Hmph. Must be the event then."
"Perhaps... Would you like any pyromancies? I have the time."
"Eh."
:origin()/pre00/dd7a/th/pre/f/2017/104/3/b/citadel_apartment_by_enterprise_e-db5tto8.png)
