Frontier Online

Twice In One Day Part 19

Rydr shrugged away the unhelpful thoughts. To him, it didn't matter too much how his condition worked, just that he wasn't further crippled by it. 

The shirtless giant stood there in the mine tunnel for almost half an hour, lost in his imaginings. Over and over again, Rydr used his mental map to jump around the tunnel in his mind.

Hundreds of repetitions of the same movements flitted by his mind's eye. Every little mistake that sent him tumbling made Rydr's avatar jerk in place, the ghost of an imagined blow made real. 

*****

On the other end of the tunnel, farther up its slope, Urginok busied himself with a video he recorded earlier. 

Unbeknownst to the other two members of his new party, Urginok paid for recording servers to house the terra-bytes of information his game-stream created. While Rydr might balk at the idea, Urginok never intended to show these recordings to anyone. 

They existed to help develop his own combat style. When Rydr started to stand in place, Urginok pantomimed a strike he'd used to fight with the wolves. 

Hidden from Rydr and Syrna, Urginok walked through an incredible AR overlay of the previous fight projected onto the tunnel. Every few seconds, the tank paused the playback and walked around the recording.

The brunette tank lined himself up with his recorded version and moved from each stance to the next, finding weaknesses in his own movements. Anytime Urginok found unstable footwork, he spent several minutes adjusting the movements until they felt smooth. 

Wherever the tank remembered a tight spot, weak hit, or an attack he could have dodged, he poured over the footage relentlessly. Until the young man was certain he wouldn't make the same mistake again, he wasn't satisfied. 

Nearby, where Urginok "shadowboxed" in the tunnel, Syrna still focused on the runic writing. In particular, she concentrated on the section nearest the giant hole in the wall. 

When Syrna told the boys that she translated the wall, which warned her about the trap, it wasn't true. The comparison she made to the Rosetta Stone was accurate but flawed.

The Rosetta Stone worked because one of the three languages was well known. The reader used the known language to translate the other two; Syrna didn't have a known language to work with the runic writing and scribbled goblinoid on the wall.

What the blonde told the other two earlier was based on sentence structure. Since Syrna lacked a common denominator to translate, she hazarded an educated guess based on its grammar structure. 

In her childhood, Syrna spent time online just looking at different languages, obsessing over them even before she could read them. Later on, when she finally translated them herself, Syrna noticed a trend in different types of languages.

They all had a tell. Whether the language was meant to read left-to-right, right-to-left, or top-to-bottom, they all used an indicator of urgency. 

But, it also helped that the goblins carved a literal arrow into the wall. The arrow pointed at the suspiciously non-rune-graffitied section of the wall that she made Rydr break.

The archer never knew about the giant ball of death, only that it was something bad. As soon as that goblin party rounded the corner, she instantly chose to roll the dice on what type of deadly trap it was. 

The guys never needed to know how close it really was.

The longer Syrna studied the runes, the more off they felt to her. When the archer stopped to rub her temples, eyes closed, the runes imprinted themselves in her brain, burning bright in different colors. More than just that, when Syrna shook her head to get rid of the strange sensation, the runes moved.