Before he could react, Rotgoriel was gone. And in the fading image of the mirror, he saw his body open its eyes and spit out dirt.

Then he snapped his gaze back to the mask. “Dark Chant!” it said, and a maddening babble of words started to rise up...

...only to cease as Aunarox shouted “Phantasm, Je Ne Seis Quois!” and the room went silent. The mask’s lips moved, but there was no sound.

No sound, save for Aunarox, who turned a cheerful smile to Rich. “You have perhaps a few minutes before his symbols of madness wear my sanity down to a nubbin. Have you seen an insane djinn before? I may enjoy it, but perhaps you shall not, oh golly no.”

I’ll be gone long before she is, Rich knew.

He pulled up his Chartreuse Plus suite and got to work...

Well, he tried to, at least.

Character set not found. Select the appropriate Character set to open this script.

Oh shit, what language was this in again? Something with an A?

He lost precious seconds scrolling down through the drop-down options. Arabic! That’s it!

Rich opened it up. He still had some of the recordings and half-assed translations in his Echo.

Some of the lines had shifted... could he work with that?

Half a minute in he knew the answer was a resounding maybe. The way the light flared and crawled through the lines seemed to indicate they were hitting several of the function calls.

The Icon’s Code Trap deals 10 points of sanity damage to you!

Rich snarled. He saved the script, edited out the function call that seemed to be repeating, and substituted the amended program...

...and nothing changed.

ERROR! You do not have permission to change this file!

“Fuck!” Rich bellowed.

The mask’s mouth seemed to twist into a leer.

Okay, I can’t use the compiler to overlay stuff with resources from outside the game. The game’s file protection is stopping me.

But... what about from INSIDE the game?

Rich charged toward the line of runes he was trying to edit and scraped his claws through them, shredding them into sparks and shards of bone.

The hut and everything inside it shuddered, and for a second Rich felt like he was being pulled apart...

...but only a second. Then a set of new red lines blazed to life, directly behind the mask. To his dismay, Rich saw that the characters almost exactly matched the line he’d just manually deleted.

Of course, he built in a failover. He had time to set this up perfectly. Rich ground his teeth as he sought for an answer.

I need to work fast, and I need to be able to read this stuff. There might be something I can do if I can just understand the full scope of it. Why, oh why didn’t I finish translating this shit?

Wait. That was the key, maybe. Rich reached for his Echo. Surely there was an Arabic translation program out there on US.net somewhere.

NO CONNECTION FOUND

...oh, right. The people who were going to burn him to death had taken him to a network dead zone. So he couldn’t call for help while he was burning to death.

Then how am I playing this game? An errant thought wondered. He pushed it aside and focused on matters at hand.

“I need to read this stuff, and I can’t,” Rich said, as he frantically tried to compare symbols to his translation list. “How do I solve that?”

Aunarox looked at him strangely. “You cannot read this?”

“No!”

“Do you wish to?”

“Yes!”

“I know this language, but making it so that you can read it will cause us to be exposed to your masked foe’s dark chant again. Do you still wish this to be done?”

“Shit.” Rich said and took a breath. “Do you have anything to help guard my sanity?”

“Hmmm... no, sadly I do not.”

Rich sighed and considered.

I really don’t need to see the whole thing. It’s triggering an effect and looping it. I just need to disable the loop... but I can’t because it’s behind the mask. Still, it has to have a return somewhere.

“No,” he decided “Don’t translate everything. I need you to search for the following commands...”

He was glad he’d read up a bit on Haskell. It didn’t have anything he hadn’t seen before in other languages, save for being more modular than most.

Oddly enough, though, after reading the walls Aunarox told him she couldn’t see a single ‘For’ command anywhere in the mix.

How? Rich thought furiously. It was clearly looping!

Two flares of the toxic effect, and seventeen sanity later, he had Aunarox focus on the lines directly after the mind blast.

There were no commands that seemed to cause the loop to repeat itself!

I’m not dealing with a loop, he realized. This has to be taking an iterative approach. Which means... which means that trying to counter this by disabling the loop is not going to work. The loop’s already kicked off at the start of the program. It’ll keep repeating unless...

“Get behind me,” he told Aunarox. “It’s brute force time.”

And the second she moved behind him, he roared “Burninate!” and hosed the walls down with fire.

Your Burninate skill is now level 11!

Symbols flared and disappeared into showers of sparks, the yellow light turned orange, and the pressure eased from Rich’s skull.

But the mask was smiling. Why was it smiling?

Rich got his answer as what he thought were sheets peeled free of the burning walls. They wriggled out, flapping what turned out to be long wings, rows of eyes along their edges opening and blinking as red words faded in above their heads.

MONAD – LEVEL 10

“Fight fast!” Aunarox called from behind him. “You have freed the monads!”

Rich knew what monads were. They were a programming pattern, a way of structuring your code so that you could simplify a series of complicated procedures.

And their big strength was wrapping variables.

Here, in the game, they’d taken on literal life. “They’ll seek to bind you!” he called back to Aunarox, as he readied his fire again. “Keep moving! Scaly Wings!”

Then he took his own advice and kept the fire going, biting and clawing like mad whenever one of the monads got near.

Your Burninate skill is now level 13!

Your Dodge skill is now level 13!

Your Brawling skill is now level 14!

Your Brawling skill is now level 15!

AGL+1

It was close.

It was damned close.

They stuck on him whenever they got through his guard, adhering like sheets covered with glue. Twice they came near to overwhelming him, and twice he had to burn them off his wings and legs, suffering damage from his own breath each time. Fortunately, between his natural armor and his Flameborn skill, the damage wasn’t too horrible.

Aunarox, for her part, zipped around and blasted them with lightning. She was everywhere they weren’t, and without her, he would have been drowned in sheer numbers. But those numbers went down with every strike he landed, and every cone of fire he blasted out. Until finally the last one lay on the floor, twitching and shuddering.

Rich whirled then, panting and glaring at the mask. “Is that all?” he roared.

Then Aunarox spoke, and her voice held pure horror. “That mask is an illusion!”

“What? Where did he—”

The mask fell from above and slammed onto Rich’s muzzle.

And he beheld the world through the eyes of the Thing in Yellow.

The Icon deals 17 points of sanity damage to you!

Rich grunted, as he felt his mind start to fray, felt something creep in around the edges, felt like a dark tide was rising in his skull...

And with a flash of brutal clarity he knew what he had to do.

The dragon’s claw whipped up, and drilled through the eye socket of the mask, and the eye below.

CRITICAL HIT!

DEX+1

You have afflicted yourself with the Lost Eye condition!

There was no pain, but God DAMN that was uncomfy. He heard Aunarox gasp in horror, but he didn’t care, didn’t have time as he hauled the mask off his face, taking the eye with it in a bloody gush.

He didn’t have time to look up and see the number that came out of him, but he knew he’d been hurt worse than he’d ever been hurt before. And he knew that Rotgoriel would have some choice words to say to him, once this was all done.

He slammed the mask to the floor, and it howled, so loudly that some of its voice made it through Aunarox’s silence illusion.

It howled more loudly when he jammed his other claw through its other eye socket, gripped it tightly, and pulled.

You are now DESPISED by the Children of the Yellow Icon! Be warned, they will attack on sight!

It screamed as it broke, and for a second, a string of red symbols glowed above it... not damage, but something else.

“Did you see that?” Rich asked.

“Yes,” Aunarox replied. “I think that was her name.”

“Her? That was female?”

“Once. Cassilda? Cressilda? I think that was one word in there. Along with a forty-one.”

“Forty one?” Rich spluttered. “We just took down a level forty-one mob?”

You are now a level 2 Cultist!

CHA+3

INT+3

LUCK+3

You are now a level 3 Cultist!

CHA+3

INT+3

LUCK+3

You are now a level 4 Cultist!

CHA+3

INT+3

LUCK+3

You are now a level 5 Cultist!

CHA+3

INT+3

LUCK+3

You have learned the Dark Chant skill!

Your Dark Chant skill is now level 1!

You have learned the Servant of Darkness skill!

You have learned the Unhinged Mind Skill!

You are now a level 6 Cultist!

CHA+3

INT+3

LUCK+3

You are now a level 7 Cultist!

CHA+3

INT+3

LUCK+3

You are now a level 7 High Dragon Hatchling!

CON+25

PER+25

STR+25

WILL+25

Armor+15

Cool+15

Mental Fortitude+15

“Oh wow. Oh holy wow,” he breathed. “But why Cultist levels? I didn’t use any Cultist skills.”

Aunarox laughed next to him, stroking his head, and he leaned into it. Though the annoying throb from his eye kind of dulled the pleasure from the contact. Being stuck with half his vision wasn’t fun either. “Ah, but you slew a high priest of another cult, did you not?” she asked him. “That would seem to me to be a very Cultist thing to do.”

“Heh. You’re not wrong. Okay...” he got his game brain back on. “After killing comes looting. Let’s see...”

“The mirror...” he said, looking to where it lay forgotten on the floor.

The blue djinn picked it up and considered it. “Its power is spent today. Tomorrow it may be usable again.”

“That’s good, because I’m not sure logging out would work right now. I’m not even sure how I’m here, because there’s no network where I am, let alone any darknet—” Rich realized he was babbling and shut up. “Okay. Let’s search.”

Aunarox helped him toss the place. To his disappointment, there wasn’t much. A few twists of colored powder left over from the ritual that created the mirror, some gold ornaments, and the mirror.

They left the shattered mask where it was. Rich had seen too many horror movies to risk touching that again. Aunarox made the loot disappear into thin air, and the pair made ready to leave.

“Wait,” Rich said, just as she was about to touch the curtain.

Midian had taught him a lesson, long ago, one he’d taken to heart. You’re never as vulnerable as when you’re leaving the dungeon.

They had no way to look outside, and he’d just gone straight to enemy status with the villagers. “Can you turn us invisible?” he asked.

“Both of us? No,” the djinn said. “One of us? It is simple enough!”

“You’ve got the treasure, and I’m beaten up. I can respawn.”

“As can I.”

“What?” He considered her, shocked. Was she that important an NPC? “All right... well, you take the invisibility. If anything attacks us, I’ll fly off. Just stick with me.”

It was a decent plan, as it went.

The plan lasted all of three seconds, as Rich stepped through the doorway...

...and saw Geebo in front of him, bound and gagged, and in the hands of a sneering leather-clad man wielding a glowing knife.

“Hey there,” Captainstabyn said, as his three friends formed ranks in front of him. “Let’s talk, Rutger.”

RUTGER'S CHARACTER SHEET

Spoiler: Spoiler

Name: Rutger Royal

Age: 2 Days

Jobs:

Cultist (Anjuuta) 7, High Dragon Hatchling 7

Attributes Pools Defenses

Strength: 231 Constitution: 228 Hit Points: 459 Armor: 120

Intelligence: 60 Wisdom: 40 Sanity: 100 Mental Fortitude: 120

Dexterity: 15 Agility: 40 Stamina: 55 Endurance: 0

Charisma: 55 Willpower: 226 Moxie: 281 Cool: 120

Perception: 226 Luck: 52 Fortune: 278 Fate: 14

General Skills

Brawling – Level 15

Dodge – Level 13

Fly – Level 14

Ride – Level 1

Stealth – Level 2

Swim – Level 2

High Dragon Hatchling Skills

Burninate – Level 13

Chomp – Level 8

Draconic Tongue – Level N/A

Dragonseye – Level 15

Flameborn – Level N/A

Hoarder – Level 1

Limited Equipment – Level N/A

No Thumbs – Level N/A

Scaly Wings – Level N/A

Slow to Age – Level N/A

Tail Slap – Level 2

Cultist Skills

Conceal Status – Level 1

Curses – Level 1

Dark Chant – Level 1

Darkspell: Fool's Gold – Level 1

Enhance Pain – Level 1

Occult Eye – Level N/A

Servant of Darkness – Level N/A

Transfer Wounds – Level 1

Unhinged Mind – Level N/A

Unlocked Jobs

Cleric, Conjuror, Fire Elementalist, Grifter, Knight

Gear: