“Now, let’s get back to sinning.”
He took out his scriber and etched his crimson sign into the dirt. This time it read “Fear the Cutthroat Walker, Sanguine.” Only Sam could read his crazy messages, a fact that disappointed him. He knelt down and touched the message which once again glowed red and whisked him away to another plane. He noticed that he was in a random part of the forest, this time far away from where he was in his own world. He hadn’t been to this part of the forest yet in his own game. He didn’t have a lot of time to survey his surroundings as the tester he had encroached upon was right in front of him up on an incline, just staring at him.
Now encroaching upon the plane of IMMORtAL_Kalika.
The tester used a small female avatar and was in human form. The avatar had dark brown skin, dark red hair, and even at the distance he was from her, Sam could see her eyes were a shimmering yellow color. It wasn’t an easy color to create with the character customizer. Sam couldn’t figure out the setting she chose to get the shimmer effect.
Her long black boots and bright white gloves gave Sam the impression that she had started the game with the Alchemist class, which was brand new territory for this game. He was curious as to what it could really do. Instead of wearing the Alchemist’s cloak or any protection for her upper body, the girl instead was stripped down to her bra which covered all but the top part of her size B breasts. She also didn’t wear the Alchemist’s cowl, instead opting to let her mid-length hair flow freely.
Sam couldn’t get a read on her. She remained still and her face seemed totally blank as she stared at him. He expected some level of fear or at least some annoyance at his sudden arrival.
They both stood still and stared at each other for what felt like two solid minutes. Sam was quickly getting impatient as he listened to the forest ambience that was the soundtrack to their stare down. He continued to remain as still as the girl was and they faced off for another minute before she stepped backwards, turned, and started running. Sam laughed before quickly pursuing her.
Clever girl, Sam thought, you were just stalling. It won’t buy you much time though.
He ran up the incline and as soon as he reached the top, he lost his footing and fell into some sort of opening at the top of the incline. Once he saw what he was falling into, his stomach dropped and he yelled into the chasm that stretched endlessly below him. After a while he stopped falling and his screen turned black followed by the words:
You Have Been Vanquished.
Sam found himself near the Soul Beacon of his own plane feeling very disoriented and sick. He felt like throwing up and the headache was coming back like when he had died before. Alex still hadn’t fixed the pain simulators. Sam had to make sure that he played safer. He had hoped that dying as a Walker wouldn’t cause that pain. The thought of his death made him think of the tester who had just bested him. Was it a fluke, he wondered. He had to replay it all in his head to get a sense of what had happened.
“That bastard!” he said grinning. “She tricked me.”
Her staring game was merely a distraction and when she ran she knew it would bait him into chasing her. She was already on the other side of the chasm when he showed up. That was what he had figured anyway. IMMORtAL_Kalika wasn’t a tester Sam had any familiarity with in real life, so he didn’t really know the player’s style or tactics, but if he or she had planned that outcome of their encounter then whoever that person happened to be was reasonably smart at the very least.
“Ooooooh! I hope I get to run that one back again.”
Sam’s blood was boiling and he hurriedly equipped his Sinner’s Scriber and wrote “Salty Runback” in crimson into the dirt. He crossed his fingers as he teleported into the next plane. Once there, he immediately started looking around for his target. He balled his fist tightly around his Rapier and gritted his teeth in a predatory smile once he saw the words he wanted to see.
Now encroaching upon the plane of IMMORtAL_Kalika.
He was once again in a part of the forest that he didn’t really recognize. There was a large archway covered in thick white mist way up in the distance. It looked like it might have been a way out of the forest or maybe even some type of dungeon. If he swung around deeper into the forest, he could reach it, but for now his attention was focused on finding Kalika, wherever she was.
He didn’t need to go very far to find her. She was right ahead, under a cluster of tall trees. This time, she gave a bow, never taking her shimmering yellow eyes off of Sam. Now, there was a playful smile on her lips, one that Sam read as “I got you last time, now what’re you gonna do?”
Sam returned her bow with a bow of his own. He also kept his eyes on her the whole time. Once they were done with the pleasantries, he jogged towards her with his Rapier and shield ready in front of him. He kept his eyes peeled for any nasty environmental traps, a tough thing to do while examining his opponent. At a glance, her playstyle seemed odd. She wasn’t using a shield at all, not even a tiny Deflector like Sam had before. As a matter of fact, it looked like she wasn’t using any weapons at all. Both of her hands were empty.
What the heck are you up to, Sam thought to himself. You must think I’m a small-fry. Let’s go ahead and show you why you need to be taking me more seriously.
If she was any good then she would wait for Sam to attack and then parry his attack. Sam didn’t remember if you could parry an attack with your bare hands in this game, but he assumed it was possible. He broke into a sprint once he was only a few feet away and ran to her side. His burst of speed would catch her off guard, especially since he’d increased it. As she turned towards him, he quickly rolled towards her back. He was laughing in his head.
This’ll teach you to fight me with no gear!
He quickly bounced to his feet and was knocked off guard when something collided with his face. Whatever it was had done very little damage, but it did knock him off balance a little.
“What the hell?” he wondered aloud.
The girl was in his face and actually attacking him with her bare fists with repeated combinations. The damage was pitiful and even multiple hits barely racked up to anything significant. Despite the low damage, Sam was still worried. She had effectively locked him into some sort of stun state where he couldn’t move until she was done attacking. Once her combination ended, she rolled away and Sam gave chase, this time ready to attack. Once he closed in on her, she surprised him again by turning around and throwing a wild haymaker. He instinctively pulled his shield up in front of him which caused her hand to rebound off the shield like so many of the plant enemies he had faced before. Perfect! He thrust his Rapier at her for some heavy damage.
Unfortunately she didn’t suffer the same deflection penalty that Sam and the other enemies faced from having their attacks deflect off of a shield. She recovered far faster and was able to parry Sam’s thrust. Her timing was perfect and she walked up to him to deliver a cool looking, though very painful opening blow. She drove her bare fist deeply into Sam’s stomach, which caused him to involuntarily cough up ridiculous anime levels of glowing blood. She hit him so hard that he was briefly lifted from the ground and when he fell back onto her fist, she heaved him down to the ground onto his back.
When all was said and done, he had only lost about a fifth of his total HP which wasn’t bad at all. She would have to catch him off guard four more times to win at this rate. Sam was in a lot of pain as he rose to his feet, but he was grinning. He knew that he had her now. He only needed a few powerful thrusts to take her out and he had a range advantage. He could poke at her with his Rapier from outside her parry range if he needed to, and that’s what he did.
IMMORtAL_Kalika didn’t have many points invested in her HP. Sam landed two light pokes on her from behind his shield and took off a sixth of her total health with each strike. He had done more damage to her with two easy attacks than she did with an opening blow which was supposed to be many times stronger than basic attacks.
“You
’re a little bit underleveled, aren’t you darling?” Sam wished that she could hear him. “Don’t worry, I’ll finish you quick. No need to draw this out.”
Surprisingly, she went on the attack again and tried to close the distance between the two of them as Sam backpedaled into the forest, though she stopped abruptly in her tracks. Sam briefly spared a glance behind him and saw that there were enemies near him. He was in spitting distance of them. It was two absurdly large and muscular brown bears, only they looked ghoulish with eyes that glowed red against the backdrop of the dark forest night. Large swathes of their fur was completely missing and where their skin was exposed, they had cracked gray patches covered with dried blood that looked bloated and diseased. He knew that since he was an encroaching Walker, that the enemies wouldn’t react to him, but it looked like his opponent knew it too.
“Looks like a stalemate, Ms. Immortal. What will you do, I wonder?”
Sam smiled. She was in a tough spot now. The clear choice to make would be to simply run away opposite the enemies. Sam would follow, of course, and they could continue their fight uninterrupted that way. He watched closely for the first sign of her running. If he started running now, he might be able to get to her and get a backstab as she turned and started running.
As if reading his very thoughts, IMMORtAL_Kalika ignored conventional wisdom and charged right at Sam, aggroing (angering and attracting) the nearby undead bears behind Sam. They hulked forward, walking right by him and towards his opponent. Kalika split between them with a very well timed roll, skipping their wide aggressive swipes altogether.
She landed in front of Sam and rolled again, this time behind him. Sam had the advantage this time though. As she was still in the middle of her roll, he quickly ran up behind her to attack. She barely dodged him with another quick roll forward. Luckily Sam hadn’t attacked yet and was able to keep his running momentum. He was closer to her now than before and quickly thrust his Rapier at her back. He wasn’t close enough to get his special backstab, but his light thrust did catch her for another sixth of her health, leaving her with half her health.
Three more quick attacks would finish her, or one and a heavy attack or better yet, a single well-timed charged attack. He was still within range of her and since he recovered quickly thanks to using a light attack, he continued to follow right behind her. She rolled again and he instantly followed suit.
Strange. Right before he went down for his own roll, he noticed that she angled hers deeply to the right. She had been running towards the left the whole time and Sam had rolled in that direction where he assumed she would be. She recovered before he did and he saw that she had a good angle at his back now.
As soon as he got to his feet, he attacked with his Sword Uppercut to discourage her from backstabbing him, though he ended up missing her completely. Her strafing speed was faster than his own, if only by a little and she rolled past the end of the quick upwards blow at the last minute. She was behind him in no time as Sam was forced to finish the rest of the Sword Uppercut. He had to rely on his other senses to track her now. The only thing he needed was his sense of touch, as she thrust something cold and sharp into his lower back.
“Hrrgh! Bastard ...”
Sam felt the girl’s foot press lightly against his back and she gently pushed him off of her blade. He fell to the ground face first.and as his health faded, he made a realization.
“You were hiding your weapon the whole time.”
He looked up and saw her properly curtsy before rolling away from the threat of approaching undead bears. His view faded to black and he again got the message:
You Have Been Vanquished.
This Kalika player was proving that she was actually immortal. More than that, she was insanely skilled.
15 Not a Madman
“Damn, I lost all that Quintessence!”
Sam was lamenting the fact that he never made it to his Death Mark, which held eleven units of loose Quintessence. By dying a second time before collecting the contents of his Death Mark, he lost it all along with the few souls he still had inside of it. It was now replaced by his second Death Mark at Kalika’s hands, which held nothing since he brashly went back to fight her immediately instead of collecting his Death Mark near that chasm he had fallen into the first time.
Sam decided to put all that behind him and encroach again, only this time he didn’t get to encroach Kalika like he did the previous two times. He got another tester with a female avatar named CrushKills. Sam had run throughout the forest looking for her. Like with Kalika, this was the first time Sam had seen this tester’s username. She was outfitted in the default Knight’s set which was all dark metal that had a burnt and ashen appearance to it from the breastplate to the boots. It was small to match her frame. She didn’t wear the Knight’s helmet, instead opting to let her long blond hair fall down her back in a long braid. She seemed surprised when he finally caught up to her, her green eyes were wide open and trained on his ghostlike rippling form. Sam was surprised to find her in her human form. Her flawless skin seemed to take on some sort of glow. She was a gorgeous character to look at, but was not a challenge in the least. Sam easily parried one of her blows and was able to repeatedly backstab her time and time again in a vicious chain that she was unable to escape from. Even her high defense and protective armor couldn’t protect her. Sam was easily awarded one thousand souls, a loose unit of Quintessence, and a Bloody Tearstone. He was however, disappointed that he had no direct way to challenge IMMORtAL_Kalika again. He lost his desire to encroach other planes and opted to instead finish his single player campaign, at least for now.
He left the Soul Beacon near where he met King Herke and went through the Forest, killing first rosemen then some Forest Barkers. After defeating several of each enemy type and getting a drop (randomly generated item) from one of the rosemen, called a Thorn Saber, he checked his inventory and equipment again for anything that might give him an advantage during his next encroachment.
“That Thorn Saber might just be what I need and maybe I can use it with the muletta I got earlier,” he pondered aloud.
On his way to read and equip the Thorn Saber, he stumbled across something funny about his other weapons. Specifically, the Rapier. It now had a seemingly unique statistic that wasn’t present before, or at least he hadn’t noticed it before.
Rapier
Thrusting Sword
ATK 105
Weapon Damage 65
S ATK D = 8
D ATK C = 32
M ATK F = 0
B ATK F = 0
F RAT 0
L RAT 0
D RAT 0
P RAT 0
B RAT 4
Weight: 2.2lbs
S. ABS: 14,475
“S. ABS? What the hell does that even mean? Sword abs?”
That fourteen thousand four-hundred and seventy-five wasn’t there before, in any case. He was curious now, but he also didn’t want to bother with the manual right now, so he contacted someone better.
He opened his Alpha Build menu and made his call.
“Yes, Sam?” asked Alex.
“Hey, Alex, what does S. ABS stand for? It’s a value on my Rapier—oh, it’s on my Dagger too!”
He examined the stats on his Dagger and remembered that the S ABS value was there before. He just hadn’t given any thought to what it could be before, but it was growing at an exponential rate, whatever it was.
Dagger
Knife
ATK 46
Weapon Damage 10
S ATK F = 0
D ATK B = 36
M ATK F = 0
B ATK F = 0
F RAT 0
L RAT 0
D RAT 0
P RAT 0
B RAT 10
Weight: 1 lb
S ABS: 4000
“Sam, I’m not a manual you know,” she said admonishingly.
“I know, you’re better! What better way to learn the game’s systems than to ask one o
f the designers?”
“It’s also against the rules. We’ve given you all you need to learn the various systems inside the game, even a very detailed manual that won’t be available to the players once the game is officially released. It’s also a massive waste of my time.”
“Okay, okay! I got all that and I apologize for wasting your time, Alex. Buuuut ... since you’re already here, can you give me a quick explanation?”
She huffed into her microphone very loudly so that Sam could hear her frustration.
“You’re incorrigible, you know that? This’ll be the last time too. Remember, you need me to report those glitches. Please, make an effort not to piss me off.”
He made a mental note of it.
“You got it, Alex. You just caught me in a lazy moment. It won’t happen again.”
“Good, and sorry for going all Serious Sam on you.”
Sam chuckled at the classic game reference.
“Oh, I’ll have to use that one.”
“Pun well intended, Sam. We’re all just doing a lot of work here while you guys are playing. I don’t mind helping you out, but that’s only when you can’t fend for yourself, never before. Okay, done lecturing now. S. ABS refers to soul absorption. Every weapon has that value. It’s a feature unique to this project.”
Meaning it wasn’t in The Death Planes.
“Every weapon absorbs souls now? What the hell for?” Sam asked.
“Well it has a lot of cool applications. In this game we wanted the weapons to be more customizable so that each player makes a name for themselves with their own legendary weapon. So now the weapons absorb souls separate from you at a thirty-three percent rate, so whatever weapon you equip will always store a third of whatever souls you’re currently absorbing from the enemies.”