“My… people?” the dweller asks, confused.
I activate a Blood Echo and end my control over her instantly, using Shape Blood on the resulting mass of fluid in order to get a general sense of what’s around me. There doesn’t appear to be anything around us, but I’m well aware that there are monsters here that I might not be able to perceive if I’m not directly looking at them.
Still, I’m generally confident enough in my perception to spend some time asserting my next steps.
“Yes,” I say, not bothering to hide my irritation at the dweller’s slow comprehension. It’s somewhat misguided—after all, it knows Common while I can’t speak a word of its language—but still, we’re wasting valuable time. “The other dwellers. Where are they?”
Unlike the reclusive, independent skyfolk, deep dwellers are a deeply community-based species. Their power grows when they are together, and the largest dweller groups have carved out continent-spanning empires.
Dweller groups are more than the sum of their parts. For a dweller, separation from its group is tantamount to death.
The burst of information is sudden and actually helpful. Edges of it have been lost, but I can tell that once upon a time, someone that wasn’t me but now is a part of my amalgam learnt about this species in a classroom with details that I’ll never know.
“Monsters separated me,” the dweller says in broken Common, the limbs on its back fluttering nervously. “The pack there, I think.”
It gestures vaguely towards the space where it was fleeing from, indicating a span of the darkness so wide it may as well not have bothered.
I sigh. “Can you find your way back?”
“Danger,” it replies. “Danger in the floor.”
The dweller hasn’t denied its ability to pathfind.
“I’m here to deal with that,” I tell it. “Show me the way.”
It chitters nervously, but it apparently realizes that talking to me in Dweller isn’t going to get it anywhere. The dweller’s insectile limbs twitch, but it starts moving.
You may choose to also evolve your class.
I glare at the message and will it to go away.
It fades out of existence, but it returns before I can even refocus myself.
I have more pressing matters to deal with, but the shadow of the divine thing that tried to steal my body is evidently still alive and hopefully not well within me.
Yet another addition to the list of beings that want me dead or worse. As if I don’t have enough of those already.
As I follow the dweller through endless piles of putrid junk, I keep a bead on our surroundings with Shape Blood, trying to make the most out of my one level in Antimemetic Resistance.
My newest level-up didn’t come with a milestone, which is a bit out of the ordinary when I got them at level 5 and 10. Then again, the milestone at level 10 was a false evolution that ended up kind of fucking me over, so… maybe I shouldn’t expect that pattern.
It looks like I’ve reached some sort of skill cap. Rather than offer me new skills for free, my level-up notification informs me that if I want new ones, I need to swap out the old.
I already know which skills I want to add. I’ve been desperate for a skill like Restore Self to use in combat, and if this Antimemetic Cloak is anything like the one the decaying dog-rat thing had, it’ll be incredibly useful for stealth. Electromagnetism is interesting as well, but the man I took it from never really showed me whether or not it was actually effective.
What skills should I swap out?
Antimemetic Resistance advanced to level 2!
The notification catches me off guard. Skills level up when they have an opportunity to be used, and resistances are no exception. Then that means…
I disappear into my Bloodpath, which does nothing for the dweller’s state of mind. It lets out a panicked screech, but it continues onward.
Increase the amount of blood. Maximize coverage.
Shape Blood enables me to sense my blood as well as manipulate it, and with my Bloodpath, I can add a significant chunk more to it.
The sense just isn’t quite good enough. I can tell where the blood is, but I’m not exactly sure what it’s contacting.
Thanks to my brief stint with extraordinarily enhanced stats in Ravendale, I actually know which stat can help me with this.
For the first time, I put all three of my free stat points into Magic (Meta), boosting it to 10.
The change is instant, though it’s less of a paradigm shift than I’d hoped it would be. Rather than a wholesale addition of a sense, it feels like a sharpening of what I already have. Blurred edges come into focus, and suddenly, I get the sense that I know not just where the blood is, but where it can go.
And there’s an awfully suspicious moving space where my droplets of blood can’t stick to. My eyes and ears tell me it’s empty, but this sense…
There’s nothing there.
Antimemetic Resistance advanced to level 3!
But if there’s nothing there, it can’t hurt to check.
I turn myself into a thousand spears and travel through the empty space—the space that should’ve been empty.
Another one of the dog-sized rats crumples to the ground, dead.
I reform next to the dweller, who hasn’t even shown signs of noticing what I’ve done.
“You… save me,” it says. “How?”
I raise an eyebrow. Smarter than it lets on, then.
“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “Keep it going.”
Devour granted +31 XP!
I get the temporary Antimemetic Cloak as well, but I don’t really want my impromptu guide to start panicking if it suddenly loses its only protection. I’m the only group it has right now, and I’d imagine that it won’t help matters if I disappear.
And so we continue. As we travel, I manage to get Antimemetic Resistance up to level 5 as well as gaining just over 200 XP. The dweller manages to fight off exactly zero of the enemies that come its way. Once, I allow an antimemetic rat-thing to get close to it, and it just screams while flailing ineffectually at it.
For a dweller, separation from its group is tantamount to death.
You may choose to also evolve your class.
Every time I get distracted, the text comes again, and it’s not alone. A soft, crooning cacophony of voices whispers the contents of the system-text at me, insisting that I let it in.
“Go away,” I tell it again, whispering so the dweller doesn’t hear me.
You are weak.
I nearly stop short when I hear the message, see the text splayed out in the center of my vision.
Whatever this thing is, this half-dead god that refuses to die even after I Devoured it again and again, it can communicate.
You are weak. As much as I want to ignore it, those words worm their way into my head far too easily.
Memories of the all-too-recent past flash through my mind. Sapphire, a half-elf that may as well be a malicious goddess, the way she plays with my life. Scintilla, a monster so far beyond my comprehension that even its presence overwhelmed me from a hundred miles away. Simon and Rin, two people with an agenda I can’t identify that annihilated me in a fight.
I recognize disappointment, and I remove it. The thing in my head is trying to get to me. It’s trying to worm its way back inside me and take control just like it did the last time. I won’t let that happen.
The anger, however, I keep. Anger fuels desire, and my desire to improve is stronger than ever.
I don’t even realize I’ve killed another three rats until nearly-imperceptible blood paints the filthy floor of what my system tells me is Novarath’s first level.
As we continue traversing the mounds of junk, I think on what I want to do next.
I want to break the city, yes, but that stems from a deeper desire. What I want is to not have to follow the whims of beings that aren’t myself. Sapphire, the high-level ambushers she’s probably employed, the god in my head, the system itself… I want nothing to do with any of that.
In order to separate myself from that, I’m going to have to do a lot. The system has given me two pertinent objectives—it wants me to clear the anomalies on this floor and it wants me to stay put while Sapphire makes her way towards me.
While the anomalies are interesting, the lack of a reward on the objective makes me hesitant to pursue it.
Everything Sapphire touches burns.
I don’t want to get involved with either of them.
An inkling of a plan begins to form in my mind. If I’m not going to bother clearing the system quests, then everything will be on my own initiative. I don’t want to still be here when Sapphire and her goons inevitably come looking, and I want to break something.
You could be strong.
“That wouldn’t be me,” I hiss at the god-thing in my head. Why is it acting up now? Is there something about multiples of five that trigger it?
I consider trying to communicate with it instead of just dismissing the message again, but I don’t actually know how. So far, the thing hijacking my system hasn’t shown any sign of listening to me.
Before I can attempt to further converse with the message, the dweller I’ve been protecting chitters.
Up ahead, my blood makes contact with more living beings.
We’ve found the dweller’s pack.
I have to admit that I’m a little impressed by its navigation ability. Intellectually, I understand that one of the core facets of being a dweller is knowing one’s group, but there’s a difference between knowing and witnessing.
I’m surprised we haven’t encountered more monsters. Is the dweller’s group killing enough anomalies that they’re not really a problem?
A quick glance at my objectives tells me that no, I’ve not even made one percent progress on eliminating all the anomalies on this floor. Why the silence?
Maybe my Antimemetic Resistance isn’t high enough. That’s a chilling thought.
The dweller chitters once more, pulling me out of my thoughts, and the sound carries farther than it has before.
Its group returns the sound multiplied ten, twenty, a hundred times, the uniform swarm of them vibrating their limbs in unison. I can’t understand a single noise they’re making, but they seem pleased.
In the darkness, I can’t see all of them, but I have control over enough blood drops in the area that I can make out the general shape of things. They’re organized in a hexagon of hexagons, each of their steps synchronized with the others.
The term hive comes to mind. It really feels like I’m watching a single organism move.
The dweller turns to me. “Thank. You.”
And then it flits away like an iron shaving drawn to the world’s most powerful magnet, moving many times faster than I thought it was capable of. In an instant, it enters the marching structure of the rest of its brethren, and the entire hexagon of hexagon ripples as it does, each dweller adjusting its position as the new one joins.
It’s a little eerie, and that sensation only intensifies when all of them start chittering at once again. The buzzing sound of it has to be attracting any anomaly within the area, but it’s not like I can make it stop.
And then the group of… a hundred? Just about a hundred, I think. The dweller swarm starts to form words, words that I can actually recognize.
“Foreigner,” the hive chitters, a hundred voices uttering the same syllables at once. “Outsider. Protector of the lost. Reaper.”
“Dwellers,” I greet them back, raising my voice to match their volume. “What is this place?”
“The underneath,” the swarm replies as one. “That which is buried. A collection of things lost. A monument of discarded monsters.”
As a swarm, the dwellers have much more coherent Common than the individual one did. They really are different in groups. I think they might be sharing their collective knowledge, pooling it across minds. My understanding of the dwellers is limited as is. Not many people travel in these areas
“The monsters hunt you,” I say. It’s not a question. Though I lack the proper information to say exactly how large a dweller community should be, I know enough about the species that I can tell that no thriving swarm would allow themselves to live in a lethal dump like this level evidently is.
“Once we were many,” the group confirms. “Now we are few.”
I sigh. Given the connection, I would’ve liked to use the dwellers in order to pull off a greater working of magic than I can manage alone, but the chances of using them as a force multiplier aren’t looking good. “What are your capabilities?”
“We build,” they say simply. “Foreigner. You fight.”
I cock my head quizzically at the latter statement, and then a wave of nausea sweeps through me, wobbling outwards from the center of the swarm not a hundred feet away.
This one is mine.
The nausea intensifies, but I push through it. As soon as I have enough of my senses put together, I prepare myself to enter the Bloodpath—and then I stop.
The swarm still hasn’t moved.
“Marked,” the pack of dwellers say. “By—“
Their unity crumbles for a second, disharmony sweeping through them as parts of the swarm finish the sentence with their own choice of words.
The gods. The void. A god. The Titan of the Nameless Sea. Itself.
You will not receive a second warning.
All of a sudden, the nausea disappears, the effect lifting immediately.
“Now you do something?” I hiss at the voices. Predictably, it doesn’t respond. “If you want me to be strong, then fucking help.”
“Apologies,” the swarm chitters. “We were unaware.”
“That how you treat all your visitors?” I ask, eyeing them warily.
Where are the anomalies? We’ve made such a racket that I find it hard to believe that none of them have come. I ask at much after the dweller group spends a full fifteen seconds just sitting there unmoving.
“We build to remember and to protect,” the group says. “The small ones fear us. The mother does not.”
The mother. From the sound of it, that has to be an anomaly too, right?
Hm. That gives me an idea.
“If I kill the mother,” I say, “Will you build for me?”
They deliberate for a grand total of seven seconds, chittering in Dweller, and I stand there patiently, thinking of my skills.
Enhance Bleed (Bronze) was replaced by Restore Self (Silver)!
Once per hour, you can activate this skill and heal yourself proportionally to the amount of mana used. Effectiveness increases by 10% per level.
I wasn’t really using the former skill anyway, and Woundshape combined with Shape Blood already functionally does the same thing. I don’t need it.
When the dweller swarm finally turns to me, their response is simple.
“Yes.”
Objective updated: Exterminate the infestation
Rather than eliminating every anomaly, you have been tasked to kill the source of the infestation.
Eliminate the Forgotten Queen.
Reward: 3000 XP
You may also evolve your class.
Oh, fuck off.
“My… people?” the dweller asks, confused.
I activate a Blood Echo and end my control over her instantly, using Shape Blood on the resulting mass of fluid in order to get a general sense of what’s around me. There doesn’t appear to be anything around us, but I’m well aware that there are monsters here that I might not be able to perceive if I’m not directly looking at them.
Still, I’m generally confident enough in my perception to spend some time asserting my next steps.
“Yes,” I say, not bothering to hide my irritation at the dweller’s slow comprehension. It’s somewhat misguided—after all, it knows Common while I can’t speak a word of its language—but still, we’re wasting valuable time. “The other dwellers. Where are they?”
Unlike the reclusive, independent skyfolk, deep dwellers are a deeply community-based species. Their power grows when they are together, and the largest dweller groups have carved out continent-spanning empires.
Dweller groups are more than the sum of their parts. For a dweller, separation from its group is tantamount to death.
The burst of information is sudden and actually helpful. Edges of it have been lost, but I can tell that once upon a time, someone that wasn’t me but now is a part of my amalgam learnt about this species in a classroom with details that I’ll never know.
“Monsters separated me,” the dweller says in broken Common, the limbs on its back fluttering nervously. “The pack there, I think.”
It gestures vaguely towards the space where it was fleeing from, indicating a span of the darkness so wide it may as well not have bothered.
I sigh. “Can you find your way back?”
“Danger,” it replies. “Danger in the floor.”
The dweller hasn’t denied its ability to pathfind.
“I’m here to deal with that,” I tell it. “Show me the way.”
It chitters nervously, but it apparently realizes that talking to me in Dweller isn’t going to get it anywhere. The dweller’s insectile limbs twitch, but it starts moving.
You may choose to also evolve your class.
I glare at the message and will it to go away.
It fades out of existence, but it returns before I can even refocus myself.
I have more pressing matters to deal with, but the shadow of the divine thing that tried to steal my body is evidently still alive and hopefully not well within me.
Yet another addition to the list of beings that want me dead or worse. As if I don’t have enough of those already.
As I follow the dweller through endless piles of putrid junk, I keep a bead on our surroundings with Shape Blood, trying to make the most out of my one level in Antimemetic Resistance.
My newest level-up didn’t come with a milestone, which is a bit out of the ordinary when I got them at level 5 and 10. Then again, the milestone at level 10 was a false evolution that ended up kind of fucking me over, so… maybe I shouldn’t expect that pattern.
It looks like I’ve reached some sort of skill cap. Rather than offer me new skills for free, my level-up notification informs me that if I want new ones, I need to swap out the old.
I already know which skills I want to add. I’ve been desperate for a skill like Restore Self to use in combat, and if this Antimemetic Cloak is anything like the one the decaying dog-rat thing had, it’ll be incredibly useful for stealth. Electromagnetism is interesting as well, but the man I took it from never really showed me whether or not it was actually effective.
What skills should I swap out?
Antimemetic Resistance advanced to level 2!
The notification catches me off guard. Skills level up when they have an opportunity to be used, and resistances are no exception. Then that means…
I disappear into my Bloodpath, which does nothing for the dweller’s state of mind. It lets out a panicked screech, but it continues onward.
Increase the amount of blood. Maximize coverage.
Shape Blood enables me to sense my blood as well as manipulate it, and with my Bloodpath, I can add a significant chunk more to it.
The sense just isn’t quite good enough. I can tell where the blood is, but I’m not exactly sure what it’s contacting.
Thanks to my brief stint with extraordinarily enhanced stats in Ravendale, I actually know which stat can help me with this.
For the first time, I put all three of my free stat points into Magic (Meta), boosting it to 10.
The change is instant, though it’s less of a paradigm shift than I’d hoped it would be. Rather than a wholesale addition of a sense, it feels like a sharpening of what I already have. Blurred edges come into focus, and suddenly, I get the sense that I know not just where the blood is, but where it can go.
And there’s an awfully suspicious moving space where my droplets of blood can’t stick to. My eyes and ears tell me it’s empty, but this sense…
There’s nothing there.
Antimemetic Resistance advanced to level 3!
But if there’s nothing there, it can’t hurt to check.
I turn myself into a thousand spears and travel through the empty space—the space that should’ve been empty.
Another one of the dog-sized rats crumples to the ground, dead.
I reform next to the dweller, who hasn’t even shown signs of noticing what I’ve done.
“You… save me,” it says. “How?”
I raise an eyebrow. Smarter than it lets on, then.
“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “Keep it going.”
Devour granted +31 XP!
I get the temporary Antimemetic Cloak as well, but I don’t really want my impromptu guide to start panicking if it suddenly loses its only protection. I’m the only group it has right now, and I’d imagine that it won’t help matters if I disappear.
And so we continue. As we travel, I manage to get Antimemetic Resistance up to level 5 as well as gaining just over 200 XP. The dweller manages to fight off exactly zero of the enemies that come its way. Once, I allow an antimemetic rat-thing to get close to it, and it just screams while flailing ineffectually at it.
For a dweller, separation from its group is tantamount to death.
You may choose to also evolve your class.
Every time I get distracted, the text comes again, and it’s not alone. A soft, crooning cacophony of voices whispers the contents of the system-text at me, insisting that I let it in.
“Go away,” I tell it again, whispering so the dweller doesn’t hear me.
You are weak.
I nearly stop short when I hear the message, see the text splayed out in the center of my vision.
Whatever this thing is, this half-dead god that refuses to die even after I Devoured it again and again, it can communicate.
You are weak. As much as I want to ignore it, those words worm their way into my head far too easily.
Memories of the all-too-recent past flash through my mind. Sapphire, a half-elf that may as well be a malicious goddess, the way she plays with my life. Scintilla, a monster so far beyond my comprehension that even its presence overwhelmed me from a hundred miles away. Simon and Rin, two people with an agenda I can’t identify that annihilated me in a fight.
I recognize disappointment, and I remove it. The thing in my head is trying to get to me. It’s trying to worm its way back inside me and take control just like it did the last time. I won’t let that happen.
The anger, however, I keep. Anger fuels desire, and my desire to improve is stronger than ever.
I don’t even realize I’ve killed another three rats until nearly-imperceptible blood paints the filthy floor of what my system tells me is Novarath’s first level.
As we continue traversing the mounds of junk, I think on what I want to do next.
I want to break the city, yes, but that stems from a deeper desire. What I want is to not have to follow the whims of beings that aren’t myself. Sapphire, the high-level ambushers she’s probably employed, the god in my head, the system itself… I want nothing to do with any of that.
In order to separate myself from that, I’m going to have to do a lot. The system has given me two pertinent objectives—it wants me to clear the anomalies on this floor and it wants me to stay put while Sapphire makes her way towards me.
While the anomalies are interesting, the lack of a reward on the objective makes me hesitant to pursue it.
Everything Sapphire touches burns.
I don’t want to get involved with either of them.
An inkling of a plan begins to form in my mind. If I’m not going to bother clearing the system quests, then everything will be on my own initiative. I don’t want to still be here when Sapphire and her goons inevitably come looking, and I want to break something.
You could be strong.
“That wouldn’t be me,” I hiss at the god-thing in my head. Why is it acting up now? Is there something about multiples of five that trigger it?
I consider trying to communicate with it instead of just dismissing the message again, but I don’t actually know how. So far, the thing hijacking my system hasn’t shown any sign of listening to me.
Before I can attempt to further converse with the message, the dweller I’ve been protecting chitters.
Up ahead, my blood makes contact with more living beings.
We’ve found the dweller’s pack.
I have to admit that I’m a little impressed by its navigation ability. Intellectually, I understand that one of the core facets of being a dweller is knowing one’s group, but there’s a difference between knowing and witnessing.
I’m surprised we haven’t encountered more monsters. Is the dweller’s group killing enough anomalies that they’re not really a problem?
A quick glance at my objectives tells me that no, I’ve not even made one percent progress on eliminating all the anomalies on this floor. Why the silence?
Maybe my Antimemetic Resistance isn’t high enough. That’s a chilling thought.
The dweller chitters once more, pulling me out of my thoughts, and the sound carries farther than it has before.
Its group returns the sound multiplied ten, twenty, a hundred times, the uniform swarm of them vibrating their limbs in unison. I can’t understand a single noise they’re making, but they seem pleased.
In the darkness, I can’t see all of them, but I have control over enough blood drops in the area that I can make out the general shape of things. They’re organized in a hexagon of hexagons, each of their steps synchronized with the others.
The term hive comes to mind. It really feels like I’m watching a single organism move.
The dweller turns to me. “Thank. You.”
And then it flits away like an iron shaving drawn to the world’s most powerful magnet, moving many times faster than I thought it was capable of. In an instant, it enters the marching structure of the rest of its brethren, and the entire hexagon of hexagon ripples as it does, each dweller adjusting its position as the new one joins.
It’s a little eerie, and that sensation only intensifies when all of them start chittering at once again. The buzzing sound of it has to be attracting any anomaly within the area, but it’s not like I can make it stop.
And then the group of… a hundred? Just about a hundred, I think. The dweller swarm starts to form words, words that I can actually recognize.
“Foreigner,” the hive chitters, a hundred voices uttering the same syllables at once. “Outsider. Protector of the lost. Reaper.”
“Dwellers,” I greet them back, raising my voice to match their volume. “What is this place?”
“The underneath,” the swarm replies as one. “That which is buried. A collection of things lost. A monument of discarded monsters.”
As a swarm, the dwellers have much more coherent Common than the individual one did. They really are different in groups. I think they might be sharing their collective knowledge, pooling it across minds. My understanding of the dwellers is limited as is. Not many people travel in these areas
“The monsters hunt you,” I say. It’s not a question. Though I lack the proper information to say exactly how large a dweller community should be, I know enough about the species that I can tell that no thriving swarm would allow themselves to live in a lethal dump like this level evidently is.
“Once we were many,” the group confirms. “Now we are few.”
I sigh. Given the connection, I would’ve liked to use the dwellers in order to pull off a greater working of magic than I can manage alone, but the chances of using them as a force multiplier aren’t looking good. “What are your capabilities?”
“We build,” they say simply. “Foreigner. You fight.”
I cock my head quizzically at the latter statement, and then a wave of nausea sweeps through me, wobbling outwards from the center of the swarm not a hundred feet away.
This one is mine.
The nausea intensifies, but I push through it. As soon as I have enough of my senses put together, I prepare myself to enter the Bloodpath—and then I stop.
The swarm still hasn’t moved.
“Marked,” the pack of dwellers say. “By—“
Their unity crumbles for a second, disharmony sweeping through them as parts of the swarm finish the sentence with their own choice of words.
The gods. The void. A god. The Titan of the Nameless Sea. Itself.
You will not receive a second warning.
All of a sudden, the nausea disappears, the effect lifting immediately.
“Now you do something?” I hiss at the voices. Predictably, it doesn’t respond. “If you want me to be strong, then fucking help.”
“Apologies,” the swarm chitters. “We were unaware.”
“That how you treat all your visitors?” I ask, eyeing them warily.
Where are the anomalies? We’ve made such a racket that I find it hard to believe that none of them have come. I ask at much after the dweller group spends a full fifteen seconds just sitting there unmoving.
“We build to remember and to protect,” the group says. “The small ones fear us. The mother does not.”
The mother. From the sound of it, that has to be an anomaly too, right?
Hm. That gives me an idea.
“If I kill the mother,” I say, “Will you build for me?”
They deliberate for a grand total of seven seconds, chittering in Dweller, and I stand there patiently, thinking of my skills.
Enhance Bleed (Bronze) was replaced by Restore Self (Silver)!
Once per hour, you can activate this skill and heal yourself proportionally to the amount of mana used. Effectiveness increases by 10% per level.
I wasn’t really using the former skill anyway, and Woundshape combined with Shape Blood already functionally does the same thing. I don’t need it.
When the dweller swarm finally turns to me, their response is simple.
“Yes.”
Objective updated: Exterminate the infestation
Rather than eliminating every anomaly, you have been tasked to kill the source of the infestation.
Eliminate the Forgotten Queen.
Reward: 3000 XP
You may also evolve your class.
Oh, fuck off.
