A Little Chat

After a few moments, the first ping began to wear off and I immediately applied the next our of fear. Then I immediately regretted that decision.

The new ping painted a new picture where the entity was now looming over me from less than half of its original distance. Its tentacles were previously about long enough to reach out and tickle me, but now I was way less than half its reach away. If I still had a body I might have shuddered and cringed at the 'sight'.

Now that I knew my pings merely painted a still image, I started pinging the space around me at high speed. The images created overlapped and grew out of themselves, but I could now essentially track the entity in real-time. Sadly, I had next to no control over this even as I realized I simply got front row seats to dozens of eye-riddled tentacles reaching out toward my position.

They were actually swarming in from all around me, closing off any possible escape routes by throwing their weight around. The innermost tentacles of this dense network were closing in closest to me at an almost leisurely pace, as if the entity knew that I had zero idea how to move. The network of tentacles were all for show because it was aware of my pings.

As the closest tentacles came within reach of my original body, an object suddenly appeared in my position. At first I was terrified that the thing was somehow stripping me of my soul but then I recognized the object. It was an iconic rounded triangular white mask with thin down-turned crying eyes and a large frown.

As soon as it appeared, the new pings began brushing aside the old pings as the tentacles began sharply retreating. Even though it had taken longer than a minutes to toy with me in its grasp, it took less than ten seconds for the entity to retreat its entire body length back from Melpomene's mask.

I only got to watch this entity's retreat for another body-length before everything once again disappeared and even my pings cut off. For the briefest of moments, I was back in the nothingness with one the sense of shock remaining. Then the darkness seemed to be sucked away into a pinprick black hole in front of me to reveal a new location entirely.

I was standing in an empty cathedral sermon hall in front of the broken belfry's new bell house. Looking around to see that I was alone, I let out a deep breath I had not even known I was holding before continuing to take slow and deep calming breaths. For a brief moment, I actually felt like I might still die.

Once the feeling passed and I was more certain of my solitude, I ask, "Melpomene, did I actually die?"

"No," says a pleasantly familiar voice from nearby instead of in my head with the accompaniment of 'subtitles'. "You simply stepped into a subspace that exists between realms in this 'reality'. That was what we call a 'sight-seer', for obvious reasons, and they're the bottom feeders of the ultimate enemies. However, if one of them actually managed to get more than a single eye into a reality, they can reopen their entrances. The supposed hell-gate the demon worshipers tried to open was based on a splitting in reality through which the sight-seer could only fit a single eye before clogging the works."

"If the dungeon was opened and the eye survived, how bad would it be?" I ask while looking at the evening gown dressed woman sitting comfortably in a visibly old but somehow preserved pew. She was looking 'calmly' back at me without any sign of eyes or mouth behind her mask.

"Not the worst," she replies calmly enough, gesturing for me to take a seat. When I finally did sit down, she went on to say, "Only about ten times worse than what's happening right now. The portal you closed disconnected the bottom feeder's eye and its incredibly small brain, so it's currently manifesting a person form and going berserk on the environment.

"Nothing to worry about, though," she quickly reassures me just as I feel the urge to jump up and grow wings, once again proving she could essentially read my mind. "All players and contracted or otherwise affiliated NPC were teleported one kilometer out from the manor. Since the eye and its mass had expanded to such an extent, the manor itself has become the core body at the center of a mass of tentacles."

"So it's the byproduct… poop… from the bottom feeder," I say as I realize it really was just a tiny physical version of the sight-seer I was nearly eaten by. "Exactly how strong is this poop and pooper?"

Despite my best attempts to calm myself with humor, I was still pretty freaked out at the prospect of fight the poop alone. Let alone facing the real thing.

"Strong," she confirms simply. "Based on mass and size alone, it could level Sierra and some of the surrounding forestry before being brought down. You don't have to worry, though, your army is well equipped and numerous. It would only take a few minutes for the citizens alone to wipe our asses for us. You can just stay here with me."

"Do you have another survey or interview for me?" I ask curiously, wondering what would have prompted her to actually be here.

"No, I just happened to be in the area and thought you'd like to stop and chat," she replies with a shrug of her shoulders and a light attitude, making it seem like she was joking as well as not. "You know, anybody else would have died down there. Well, can't say that, anybody else in this raid dungeon," she seems to correct herself. "You're the only one here with a direct relation to one of the gods. Sure there are priests and paladins but that's commitment to the churches and temples, not the gods themselves until the elite classes."

"What's it like.. dying? That way?" I ask curiously, finding comfort in the holy-like light I had seen on Sir Pence and all of the other humanoids.

"It was actually designed to be merciful," she replies quickly, crossing her legs with her hands in her lap while facing forward toward the bell house. "It's a sneak peak at late-game content, so we can't make it too traumatic. After all that suspense, you just get snuffed out on contact and respawn. I, however… took the liberty of roping you back into our world."

"Thank you," I say immediately, without really even thinking about it. It was the least I could say since she had obviously broke the rules and saved my first life. "Did I make trouble for you?"

"Nothing I'm not allowed to do but 'advised' not to," she continues to assure me. "I needed to do it, though, as a show of sorts. I had already been forced to reveal you before and now because of the decayed matter you made there will be others involved. They needed to see how far I was willing to go."

"Would you fight a god for me?" I ask with a cheesy and teasing smile, taking my helmet off in the hopes of hinting at the goddess.

"That depends," she replies almost leisurely. "How long do you think it will take you to reach level two hundred now that your experience need per level goes up by a thousand? One hundred to one hundred and one to one hundred and two are one hundred thousand and one hundred and one thousand experience requirements. If you killed all the demons left unaffiliated to the individual clans, you'd only go up by about a level per species that only as much as fifteen levels."

"Does this biomass boss offer experience?" I ask while considering jumping up and flying away again.

"No, it simply applies the same titles and rewards to all participating players except for the killer," she replies. "You, as the sole sacrifice, get the same titles and then some with better rewards at the end of the dungeon."

Latching on to those last few words, I ask, "What's the end of the dungeon?"

Laughing for the first time, light and airily, Melpomene says, "We are inside so you cannot see it, but this underground dungeon has been breaking apart and preparing to cave in since the catacombs and manor turned into a giant abyssal beast. As the fight goes on, the dungeon experiences immense seismic activity and continues breaking down. At the end of the fight, when the disconnected eye has finally died, the goddess who was originally meant to orchestrate this event will even make an appearance and grant everybody an experience and random skill reward before transporting everybody away."

"The original goddess?" I parrot like an idiot, thinking of the original figure this cathedral and city was dedicated to.

Nodding her head in answer, Melpomene explains, "This was originally going to be a level one-hundred-plus faction quest for her to narrow down the most advantageous guild serving under her early in the game. However, the game itself is made with such a lore system that this and several other locations for divine or legendary objects are out in the open. Since a bunch of freelancers tracked down her dungeon through the city's history, I decided to make your tutorial family throw you this quest to cut in on the action. At the time, though, I had no idea what you would turn into."

"I had no idea what I would turn into," I agree almost solemnly, looking down at my armor that had technically become a part of my body when I put it on. "Nor what I might turn into later."

"Don't worry," she suddenly assures me. "You're certainly not the only person to break the game. There are a handful of shape shifting players, a handful of players who can build quick soldiers, some people with outstanding physiques or mana techniques, people who can fully embody elements… hell, soon, there's going to be somebody with the first pure-blooded dragon and they'll be able to take on a half-dragon form. Also, just because you can craft divine items does not mean your crafts have the same strength as our divine artifacts because a warhammer from you and the war god's warhammer… well, that's a mountain to your molehill for the time being."

I just got handed some inside information about other power players, albeit fairly vague information, but I did not know quite how to feel about it. There were people with powers like mine, but it id not seem like any one person had several of those broken abilities. I could create an army on a whim, transform into a monstrous being, unleash inane amounts of magic damage, and even craft top-tier equipment.

However, I felt like most of my powers were essentially softer versions of their individual abilities. Even though I could shape shift it was costly and was only good for increasing my stats and parameters a bit while increasing my reach if I did not load on my defensive production skills. In comparison to that one player I kept hearing about who could turn people into a lich of some sort, even my ability to make an army was somewhat… basic.

They were just mutant zombies designed to continually grow in numbers at the cost of dying out. There was no intelligence or cohesion among the units, making their only tactic blitzing the enemy. In comparison, the liches were much stronger because they were players who maintained their personalities and even acquired new powers which included creating more and more undead.

"Is that really something you should be worrying about right now?" Melpomene asks with a lilting laugh hidden in their voice. "None of the people you worry about have any affiliation with people who worry about you, and they likely won't. Like you, they're all headstrong and overly confident to the point they make lots of enemies. If you ever met them, you'd be more likely to befriend them than to make enemies."

"Did you forget who you're talking to?" I ask with a single arched brow in her direction. "I'm the most headstrong and confident among them, I may even have more enemies than them at this point. I doubt they'll like being around somebody who is WORSE than them."

As if this was the first time such a thought had occurred to her, Melpomene says, "You've got a point… but, I still think you'll be fine. Quite a number of them are women and women just happen to like you a lot more than everybody else."

Unable to meet the vague gaze of the shadowy sockets in Melpomene's gaze, I simply look to the side and fight the urge to cringe while saying, "No matter what the situation, somebody always has to make things weird. Can you, I don't know… NOT bring that up?"

*