Somnia Online by K.T. Hanna (reading strategies book txt) 📕

Caution: Make sure you do not cause your MA to run out. Should that happen, backlash will render the caster unconscious for a period of seconds not less than half the caster’s level. Make sure you choose your targets wisely.

Havoc just nodded, going back to the fight. When Phantom had dwindled her MA down to the low hundreds, she pulled the spell. The creatures, now far lower in health, paused and turned back toward their initial attackers. Murmur didn’t think she’d accomplished much except for allowing them to cause each other a decent amount of damage.

She decided she didn’t like spaghetti monsters at all, whether they were short, tall, or flying. Taking a deep breath, she dove into raiding mode. It was harder in this game world, or maybe just this zone. Because of how much she knew they needed to defeat these bosses. So much was riding on it. She willed herself to concentrate.

The rangers thrived in this environment, able to maneuver throughout the whole huge courtyard. Pillars of steel lined the way, but they’d come up from the fountain into a circular courtyard with steel monuments scattered around like a graveyard they’d yet to fill. Murmur didn’t like the desolate feel to the place. It made her head feel cold.

A couple of the rangers stood up on the top of the steel pillars, firing down into the elastitite creatures. Their eyes swiveled, but it appeared that their heads weren’t the best at following ups and downs. At least it had one weakness, right?

She watched as they baited the creatures, hitting them with slows, with fire, and with ice.

Merlin called out over raid, “It appears ice is the most effective, just not as effective as we’d like.”

Sure, that made sense. Ice would make it freeze and thus easier to snap. Except when you got a whole mess of spaghetti together and chucked it into the freezer, that stuff wasn’t breakable. In fact, it was a massive lump of frozen spaghetti that the microwave wasn’t even going to want to separate.

To her right, the witches stood side by side, alternating their spells one by one to keep the onslaught going. She wanted to understand more about the class so badly. The mages shot fire and ice spells at the things, trying to make them splinter faster, while the bards sang anything that could give them an edge. The healers didn’t have to work overtime, but they did need to churn out numbers consistently to make sure everyone survived.

That whole lasso thing that punched Dansyn into the wall was difficult to avoid if you weren’t paying the closest attention possible.

Murmur watched as Snowy dove into battle as well. His ferocious teeth made short work of individual strands of the strange rubbery flesh. He was having fun, but she could feel a wave of frustration coming from him. Something she’d never noticed him emit before this fight.

Finally, the second one fell, joining the first, and Murmur stood there, watching the bodies as they were looted. Glancing at the path that led away from the courtyard they were in. It was the only way to go and there were at least nine more of them that she could see, this was going to get long before it got good.

“Drop anything decent?” she asked as Sinister skipped over to her.

“Just a resilient fabric that our little crafter would kill for if we didn’t just give it to her.” Sinister grinned and her eyes flickered to the AIs. “Can’t they, like, help us more?”

Murmur gazed over at them too, frowning in thought. Sin had a point; hell, she’d thought as much herself. But the fact was, she was quite sure they were only supposed to be here in an observatory position, so the help they were already getting was above and beyond what they should have been doing anyway.

“Sometimes,” she said to Sinister as she began to leaf through her combat logs looking for something that would make these fights a bit easier. “Sometimes we shouldn’t look those gift AIs in the mouth.”

Storm Entertainment

Somnia Online Division

Game Development Offices - Shayla’s Office

Day Thirty-Two

Shayla looked up and across at her alert screen, shifting to bring it into everyone’s visibility. The alarms attached to the game were going off in a rather spectacular fashion. Damn it. She’d expected this to take longer, but apparently, they were getting impatient.

“Shayla?” Davenport’s tone was low and commanding and said a whole lot of things at once, not the least among them: what the fuck?

“System’s being overwhelmed, sir, just as they’re activating raising the prison.” She tried to grate out the words with enough authority that he’d just let her deal with the crises, but she knew he had a lot riding on this.

“Full report as soon as you can.” She often didn’t give him enough credit. He might be aging up there, but his mind was sharp as was his sense of business acumen. Shayla wasn’t entirely sure how she was going to tell him that the whole project was about to come crashing down around him.

“What do you want me to do?”

Shayla turned to see Laria standing in her doorway, breathless, her eyes filled with fire. “Grab a seat, plug your head in, and let’s see if we can contain the virus and figure out why the servers are being flooded with a backlash.”

It was a relief to have her best friend with her. They always had each other’s backs. Especially like this.

Only there wasn’t much the other woman could do in this stage. Somnia was uncoupling, becoming unstable as it strained to power this new addition into being from the holding tank it had been in. Its AIs were beyond the system to control anymore and barely capable of keeping up with them. Somnia was expanding its reach, its power, and for all she knew, its borders, taking up much more than just space on a set of servers.

Shayla kept her head down and