Succubus 8 (Riddles And Revenge): A LitRPG Series Page 11

  This time, it was me who stared her in the eyes. “Reality’s not disappointing. Quite the contrary.”

  As she gazed back at me, she swallowed hard and blushed the tiniest bit.

  Then she looked down at my crotch – just a glance – and blushed even harder as she looked back up at me.

  I realized I had the start of an erection – more like a three-quarters chubby –

  And she must have seen it through my jeans.

  Which turned me on even more.

  I’m pretty sure it turned her on, because suddenly I became aware of two hard little points pressing against her tight shirt. They hadn’t been visible just a few seconds before.

  She wasn’t wearing a bra… and her nipples had just gotten erect.

  I don’t know what got into me. I was almost on the verge of asking her if she wanted to go grab something to eat – like maybe back at my apartment –

  When some dweeby dude walked by with a pile of papers and looked at us funny.

  Like, What the fuck is going on here?

  That’s when I came out of my little lust-induced bubble, and it hit me that a hundred people in the room could be watching me and Luna eye-fucking each other.

  Not exactly the best thing to be happening in your place of work.

  Luna realized it, too, because she cleared her throat. “Ahem. So – ”

  “So – ” I said at the same time, running my hand awkwardly through my hair, “I, uh, got another clue, and I, uh, could use your help.”

  She frowned. “Another John the Baptist line?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  I described how I’d found Meera and included all the details, including the plaque over her head and the riddle engraved on it.

  Luna’s jaw basically dropped open. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

  “Nope.”

  “I mean, Jesus Christ – literally. You’ve got all the iconography – the cross, the stigmata, the spear through the side, the crown of thorns – even the riddle is like ‘INRI.’”

  “I know about the other stuff, but ‘INRI’?”

  “Pontius Pilate put a sign over Jesus’ head when he was crucified that read, ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.’ In Latin, it’s ‘Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum’ because – ”

  “Because there is no ‘J’ in Latin,” I remembered.

  “You took Latin?”

  “No, but I saw Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade,” I said with a grin.

  There was a scene where Harrison Ford has to navigate a trap where he must step on stones that spell out the name of God – Jehovah. He almost falls to his death because he chooses J and remembers belatedly that in Latin, ‘Jehovah’ begins with an ‘I.’

  “Movie nerd,” Luna said with a little smile, which was obviously a joke, because she had quoted Fight Club just a few minutes before. Then she got serious and rolled her eyes. “By the way, worst of the three by far.”

  It took me a second to realize she was talking about the Indiana Jones movies.

  “I agree it’s the worst out of the first three, but there’s four,” I pointed out.

  “I don’t even count Crystal Skull,” she said, and shuddered. “That was cinematic malpractice.”

  “It was nice where he picked up the hat at the very end,” I said, referencing the last shot of the movie. “And it was cool to see Karen Allen again.”

  “Did any of that make up for Shia LaBeouf swinging on vines with monkeys?” she asked acerbically. “Or the fridge in the nuclear explosion?”

  “…no,” I admitted.

  “Alright, then,” she said, like that settled it.

  Which, I had to agree – it did.

  “Did you take Latin?” I asked.

  “Nope. Español.”

  “So how’d you know about INRI?”

  “Grandma, fire and brimstone churches – remember?”

  “Yeah, but isn’t the whole INRI thing pretty Catholic?”

  She shrugged. “I watched The Exorcist at a sleepover when I was twelve.”

  “Ohhhh… that explains a lot,” I joked.

  “Yeah, watch out, I might just rotate my head 360 degrees and throw up split pea soup on you.”

  “Gotta be honest, not into that.”

  “Total deal breaker, then. Gotta have my split pea soup foreplay,” she joked, then turned serious and shook her head. “Dude, you thought the protestors were mad about a little sucky fucky? That’s nothing compared to what they’re gonna do once they find out we’ve got a villain blaspheming the crucifixion.”

  “Ohhhh, it’s going down in the QC report. Trust me, they’ll take it out way before it ever makes it into the mainstream.”

  “The question is, who the fuck would even put that in to begin with? Not that I don’t appreciate it from an iconoclastic point of view, but we work for a fuckin’ Fortune 500 company. Any idiot should know it would have less than a 1% chance of making it in, and that it’s his ass if it got found in QC. Which it did.”

  I squinted as I thought back to Chad. “The writers’ department had a guy who was booted back to intern after sneaking in rape and Hitler jokes.”

  She curled up a lip in disgust. “Charming.”

  “Yeah, but he’s not in a position anymore to sneak in something like this. Plus, I don’t think he’d do it, anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  “All he cared about was trolling the libs – and you’re not gonna do that with sacrilegious Jesus parodies.”

  She tilted her head to the side in acknowledgement. “True. So who did it?”

  I shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  “So why don’t you go ask?”

  “I’ve tried, but they’re in a meeting with the Russians.”

  “Oooooh, the Russians,” she said in falsely reverent tones. “Everyone bow down to the Almighty Dollar. Or ruble, or bitcoin, or whatever the fuck they’re buying us out with.”

  “You really think they’re going to do it?”

  “Who the fuck knows,” she said dismissively. “I’m way more interested in your riddle than I am in that.”

  “Somebody in the art department would’ve had to have made the cross, right?” I asked. “I mean, I’ve never seen a cross in the game before – not a Christian cross. Celtic, yeah, and some other variations, but not a straight-up cross. So somebody would have had to have designed it, right?”

  “That’s true…” she said with a touch of admiration in her voice. “I’ll ask around. Although, realistically, by the time I could find out, you should be able to talk to the writing department about it.”

  “Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

  “You’re saying I’m gonna get lucky?” she asked with a naughty smirk. “When, tonight?”

  I grinned, but I wasn’t ready to return to the eye-fucking – not out here in the open, anyway. “Who knows. But in the meantime, I could use some help with the riddle.”

  She looked into the air like she was pondering one of life’s great mysteries. “If only there were a source of information that was widely distributed and free to use…”

  “Then I wouldn’t have gotten to see you, now would I?”

  She gave me a sly little smile as she turned to her computer and brought up Google. “What was the clue again, O Clueless One?”

  “Not a daughter of chaos, but a son of darkness… not goddess of night, but god of nothing.”

  “‘Goddess of night’ – that could be Diana. Or Selene.”

  “Moon goddesses, right?”

  “Yup.”

  “See? I knew it was a good idea to come to somebody with ‘moon’ as their name.”

  “Ha ha,” she said without laughing as she typed in ‘daughter of chaos’ and hit ‘Enter.’

  The first result in the search engine was ‘Daughter of Chaos / Dark Souls Wiki,’ which said ‘Quelana, or Izalith's Daughter, is an enemy in Dark Souls.’

  Dark Souls was an old-school, non-virtual RPG vide
ogame.

  Luna sighed. “Unless the idiot also thought it wise to risk a lawsuit by using our competitors’ characters, I doubt this is what the clue meant.”

  “Probably not,” I agreed.

  She typed in ‘son of darkness,’ which turned up a crappy old vampire B-movie.

  “Son of Darkness: To Die For II,” Luna said in a deadpan voice. “I never knew Nicole Kidman did a sequel.”

  She meant To Die For by Gus Van Sant, the director of Good Will Hunting and Drugstore Cowboy.

  I knew the reference she was making, so I just kept quiet. Nothing worse than saying I got your joke, I got your joke – see, I’m smart too!

  Although Chris Evans did it really well in the first Avengers when Captain America hastily informs everyone that he gets the 1939 Wizard of Oz ‘flying monkeys’ joke.

  Luna typed in ‘goddess of night’ next –

  Which hit pay dirt in the form of a Wikipedia entry.

  “Oh ho,” she said. “Nyx, the Greek goddess/personification of Night. And look, she’s the daughter of the Greek god Chaos, too.”

  “And ‘nix’ with an ‘i’ means ‘nothing’!” I said excitedly.

  “You think that’s his name? Nix?”

  “I’d put money on it.”

  “What about the ‘son of darkness’ part?”

  “Every single person who’s encountered him says they haven’t actually seen him – that he strikes from the shadows. And one of the other clues said he was ‘forged in shadow.’”

  “It fits,” she admitted. “But… so what?”

  “What do you mean, ‘so what’?”

  “So you’ve got his name. What does that get you?”

  “Maybe if I say ‘Xin,’ he goes back to the 5th dimension,” I joked.

  It was a callback to her Mister Mxyzptlk joke from yesterday. If Superman was able to trick him into saying his name backwards – ‘Kilp-ill-skim’ – then Mxyzptlk went back to the 5th dimension.

  “Or he starts singing ‘Age of Aquarius,’” Luna deadpanned.

  I frowned for a second – then finally made the connection.

  The 5th Dimension was also a musical group from the 60s that sang – you guessed it – ‘Age of Aquarius.’

  “Actually, wasn’t it ‘Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In’?” I asked, using the actual name of the song and totally being a smartass.

  “I could have said ‘maybe he’ll start singing medleys from Hair,’ but I didn’t figure you for a Broadway musical kind of guy.”

  I didn’t know for sure, but I was guessing ‘Aquarius’ and ‘Let The Sunshine In’ were from the musical Hair.

  I was about to respond, but she kept going. “Or would you have preferred ‘Up, Up And Away In My Beautiful Balloon’? Or ‘Marry Me Bill’? Or – ”

  “Alright, alright, you win,” I grumbled. “Music nerd.”

  “Damn straight. But you still haven’t answered the question – what does knowing his name actually get you?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know – but I’m about to go find out. Thanks.”

  “Come back any time. Give me a call beforehand and I’ll even take down the orc dongs for you.”

  I laughed. “That would make it a lot more pleasant.”

  She wrote something down on a Post-It note and handed it over.

  On it was her extension –

  But also her cell phone number.

  “Call any time,” she said.

  I looked at her… and she looked back at me.

  More sexual tension.

  “Alright,” I said, my heart beating a little faster. “See you soon.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “I certainly hope so.”

  I looked back as I walked out of the art department – and caught her looking at me before she flashed a bashful smile and returned to her computer.

  16

  I returned to the street to find the pirates gone and Alaria, Stig, Meera, and Eluun just standing there.

  No one else acted like it was the least bit odd to hang out in a graveyard with a dude who stands motionless in one place for an hour – except Alaria.

  “Did you go back to your world to find the answer?” she asked.

  “What?” Eluun asked, confused.

  “What world?” Meera asked.

  Stig just yawned.

  It made sense. The others were NPCs with relatively high levels of artificial intelligence… but Alaria was on another level entirely. Desmond, her programmer – the one who looked like Gilfoyle from Silicon Valley – had told me multiple times that Alaria was pretty much right at the threshold of being sentient.

  “Religious rites,” I said to Eluun and Meera, who both went Ah and nodded like they completely understood. Then I turned to Alaria. “Did you have a master named Nix?”

  She frowned. “Nix? No…”

  Shit…

  So Luna and I hadn’t solved the riddle.

  Damn this was frustrating.

  “Alright, we have to figure out where to go next,” I said. “After we left Exardus the first time, Krug dropped us off in Asterwaite, so that’s one option – but I think the more logical place would be Orlo’s lair.”

  “Why more logical?”

  “Our guy’s left clues at places that were way more important to us – Fernburg, Abaddon, the Northern Barrens, Exardus – and skipped places like Kvartos. Or at least I think he has, since the numbers on the riddles were 1, 2, 3, and 4.”

  “Should we skip ahead, though, and wait for him?” Alaria suggested. “Maybe go to – where would he go next?”

  “Well,” I said, thinking, “obviously Vos. We found Deek there, remember?”

  “But there were things in-between,” she pointed out.

  “Yeah… the volcano… and I guess the Plains of Mor-El…”

  The volcano was where we’d defeated Orlo, Daidonia the death cult elf, and Shyvock the bounty hunter.

  The Plains of Mor-El was where we’d fought a gigantic Orcish army.

  “I vote for skipping ahead and waiting for him,” Meera said, a savage glint in her eye.

  “Aren’t you trying to gather more clues, though?” Eluun asked. “What happens if you skip one?”

  “That’s a good point,” I said. “I don’t know what the significance of the clues are – they might help us defeat him, and if we skip one, we could be screwed. So I guess we ought to go to Orlo’s lair first.”

  Everyone agreed, so I cast my next portal – a bit reluctantly, I must say. After this one, I only had one left for the entire day. I’d already used my first to get from the Northern Barrens to Exardus.

  The counter on the ring icon showed 1.5 as we crossed through to Abaddon, then dropped to 1 as we stepped through the fiery ring onto the grassy plains outside Orlo’s lair.

  I’d taken us to the giant bay doors we’d exited as we set off after Orlo.

  I’d expected the doors to be closed, and for us to have to knock –

  But they were open.

  And dead bodies were strewn all over the hangar floor.

  They were Orlo’s demons, the ones whose souls had been transmigrated into giant metal battle golems.

  There was order to how they were arranged – all in a line, face-down on the floor like they had slumped there after death.

  And they all had the right side of their heads burnt and caved in, like if somebody had taken a blowtorch to a Jack O’ Lantern.

  It had been a mass execution.

  Nix – or whatever the fuck his name was – had lined them all up and killed them one by one.

  They must have known what was coming. The right sides of their heads were burned, but not the left, so he hadn’t just shot one huge beam through all their skulls – he’d gone down the row and killed them one by one.

  Like something out of the worst stories of gangland atrocities.

  I walked down the row, looking for one particular demon until I found him.

  Short, squat, and purple. No neck… bullet-sha
ped head.

  Grung.

  His soul had been inside the war golem who had helped us go after Orlo.

  And now he was dead.

  “Shit,” I muttered in despair.

  Except… something was wrong.

  I had freed all of the demons here, just like I’d freed Alaria and the pirates.

  I’d gotten them down below 3% hit points, then physically removed their collars.

  They should have gone into my submenu of demons I could resurrect!

  I scrolled through my list, and sure enough, I found them –

  But every single icon had been completely greyed out.

  I frowned and hit one.

  Nothing happened.

  With dawning horror, another memory came back to me.

  It was back when we had encountered Saykir for the first time. The frost elf had summoned the Ung’aroth – the black, Venom-like tentacles of the Old Gods – right in the midst of some of Krug’s pirates.

  An orange pirate had been swallowed up by the black ooze and disappeared. When I’d tried to resurrect him, I couldn’t – his icon had been greyed out, exactly like what I was seeing now.

  “Why aren’t you bringing them back?” Alaria asked.

  “I can’t.”

  “But – you freed them, just like you did Krug and his crew!” she protested. “They should be bound to you!”

  “They are, but for some reason I can’t resurrect them. Remember when Saykir used the Ung’aroth the first time we fought him, and it grabbed one of the pirates? I couldn’t resurrect him, either. I think our bad guy must have done something similar.”

  She stared in horror at the bodies. “You mean… they’re gone forever?!”

  “I’m afraid so…”

  I watched as she leaned over and gently touched Grung’s head. A single tear slid down her cheek and fell on his purple skin, and her shoulders shook with silent sobs.

  I had to turn away. It was too sad to watch.

  But something kept nagging at me.

  If Nix had control over the Ung’aroth, why execute the demons one by one? Why not just toss them into a pit of black goo all at once?

  Either he didn’t have control over the Ung’aroth, and this was something different…

  …or he wanted to frighten us.

  If he’d thrown the demons into a pit of black goo, their bodies would have disappeared… and he wanted me to find their bodies.