by Ryan DeBruyn
Starred Tower
System Misinterpret Book 1
Ryan DeBruyn
Copyright © 2021 by Ryan DeBruyn
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Cover designed by MiblArt.
Created with Vellum
To everyone who could use the distraction of another world right now!
Contents
Newsletter & Website
Chapter 1
Leanne Turle
Chapter 2
Jeff Smith
Chapter 3
Jeff Smith
Chapter 4
Jeff Smith
Chapter 5
Jeff Smith
Chapter 6
Jeff Smith
Chapter 7
Jeff Smith
Chapter 8
Jeff Smith
Chapter 9
Jeff Smith
Chapter 10
Jeff Smith
Chapter 11
Leanne Turle
Chapter 12
Jeff Smith
Chapter 13
Jeff Smith
Chapter 14
Jeff Turle
Chapter 15
Jeff Turle
Chapter 16
Jeff Turle
Chapter 17
Jeff Turle
Chapter 18
Jeff Turle
Chapter 19
Jeff Turle
Chapter 20
Jeff Turle
Chapter 21
Jeff Turle
Chapter 22
Jeff Turle
Chapter 23
Jeff Turle
Chapter 24
Jeff Turle
Chapter 25
Jeff Turle
Chapter 26
Jeff Turle
Chapter 27
Jeff Turle
Chapter 28
Jeff Turle
Chapter 29
Jeff Turle
Chapter 30
Jeff Turle
Chapter 31
Jeff Turle
Chapter 32
Jeff Turle
Chapter 33
Jeff Turle
Chapter 34
Jeff Turle
Chapter 35
Jeff Turle
Chapter 36
Jeff Turle
Chapter 37
Jeff Turle
Chapter 38
Jeff Turle
Chapter 39
Jeff Turle
Chapter 40
Jeff Turle
Chapter 41
Jeff Turle
Chapter 42
Jeff Turle
Chapter 43
Jeff Turle
Chapter 44
Jeff Turle
Chapter 45
Jeff Turle
Chapter 46
Jeff Turle
Chapter 47
Jeff Turle
Chapter 48
Jeff Turle
Chapter 49
Jeff Turle
Chapter 50
Jeff Turle
Chapter 51
Jeff Turle
Chapter 52
Leanne Turle
Chapter 53
Jeff Turle
Afterword
Social Media
Also by Ryan DeBruyn
Great Communities
LitRPG Group
Newsletter & Website
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Chapter 1
June 21, 100 AR
Leanne Turle
“Leanne, it’s swinging back around,” Nathan, my husband, shouts to me as I follow the path of the green dragon through the blue crystalline sky. Nathan is on his own floating Elysium City over two hundred meters away, but he likely injected some of his precious liquid into his voice to blare that rather useless piece of information. My hands clench on the railing in front of me. I love that man, but sometimes in combat, the old online gamer comes out in him. I don’t need the minutiae of a battle pointed out, especially at the expense of liquid; I can see the drake for myself, it’s rather hard to miss.
The dragon folds its wings and plummets, blending into the expansive forest’s foliage thousands of meters below us. This monster is just so agile, and I feel my sweating body tensing in frustration. I glance over to Nathan.
“From below, Mother!” my son, Graydon, says from the empty penthouse room behind me. My jaw clenches at another useless piece of information in combat. At least the boy didn’t inject liquid to convey it. If he is going to take after his father, perhaps I can at least break him of that frivolous habit. Graydon is a B-rank, which is quite impressive at thirty-two but he is next to useless in this fight, against the devastation of a drake. I nod stiffly and watch the wings of the drake crack open; I swear I can feel the displacement of the air from here.
I prepare to attack the S-plus creature with my specialty Blood liquid. A single point of this liquid takes nearly twenty drops of my regular liquid to create, and I loathe to part with it, knowing it will take weeks of hard work to cultivate it again.
The dragon wheels in the air like a ballerina; its grace would be beautiful to watch, if it wasn’t trying to kill me. The tail snaps out behind it, severing the top of a tree with the barb at the tip. It converts the momentum of its descent to ascend again rapidly. From previous experience, I know that the direction of the tail behind the dragon always indicates the path it intends to fly, like a rudder on a ship. Today my luck is running out: the dragon is coming right for my True Silver Array.
“Shit!” I shout, and desperately try to think of the best way to drive the thing away to one of the other five cities. I scan the empty balcony and see Graydon there; his pale face makes me reconsider. “Graydon, it’s coming for my Array,” I force out between clenched teeth. Cold sweat begins forming between my shoulder blades once the decision is made. I’m going to have to let it land. If I don’t, it will just harry us until it finds a weak link. Better to let it find my array than the skyscraper below me, with my grandkids. I look back behind me at my son. “The children are safe?” I confirm. His face pales, but he nods.
Most rankers wouldn’t let it damage the one-hundred-meter circle of finely woven True Silver mesh. Thus our current stalemate. Drakes have an irrational love for the shiny metal and won’t leave it alone. My lips peel back as I lick my incisors. Snarling, I reinforce my nerves; the decision is made. We have driven it off four times already; it’s time to put it down. Taking a deep shuddering breath, I surrender my Array. It has a self-repairing function, and while any damage means a costly loss of Sun Pill production, the harm won’t be permanent.
The dragon speeds toward my floating ‘city.’ My hands grab onto the top balcony’s railing in the lone skyscraper that is central to the whole Array, and I prepare for impact.
“Brace,” I command, using my liquid to convey a useful piece of information to the others staying in the high-rise.
My city shudders beneath me, and I flick my eyes down at the concrete balcony, trying to predict the tremors and keep my feet under me. I manage, but the shaking doesn’t stop, which startles me eno
ugh to glance back up. The dragon is stuck in the Array, caught like a whale in a fishnet. It kicks, and flaps its wings, which is what causes the additional tremors. My snarl becomes carnivorous as I recall the loss of oceans. They’ve become even more dangerous than the wilds now thanks to creatures like these. I’m the predator now, one spot out of the top ten Northern rankers.
Rolling my shoulders, I brace myself on the railing and hold my hands forward, preparing to let loose a spell I affectionately call my [Blood Bolt]. I split my focus and allow a tendril of myself to enter the pocket dimension at the center of my being. The small dimension is a world unto itself at the S-rank. I’m its creator, the one who shapes and controls every atom of it. My consciousness hovers above a small island in a churning sea of blue. The waters are my liquid whirlpool from the D-ranks, only filling an entire world now. It surrounds a landmass, creating a descending spiral and unassailable shore. At the center of the island sits my ‘volcano’ which is filled with a bubbling viscous bloodred substance. The smell of iron reaches my nose, and I call the liquid to me.
My intention opens the floodgates on the dam. A million-plus drops of red liquid careen from my God Organ’s pocket dimension and down my arms like they are the barrels of a gun. Instead of a bullet, they form an oozing ball that ripples and undulates its way through the sky. The tail on the spell reminds me of a minnow swimming toward the dragon.
The spell splashes over the monster’s green scales, drenching it in blood that isn’t its own, not yet. My snarl morphs into a terrible smile as I feel those scales through my remaining connection. My hands turn into claws, a mental aide for what I do next. The blood from the spell rips at the outer scales, seeking to tear apart the soft flesh beneath. I can feel the sanguine claws sink through a single layer before they hit the second, slightly softer scales below. I curse at my luck; it’s an extremely powerful S-plus dragon to have two layers of armor. With all my mental might, I drive the points of my [Blood Claws] deeper, slowly penetrating the under-scales, then finally sinking them into the flesh below, but I feel like I am digging through hard clay with my bare hands.
The dragon trumpets its fury when it feels my assault and then spits a clear mucus everywhere, drenching itself intentionally. This breath attack, from previous accounts, is extraordinarily caustic and deadly. Something like acid but far worse. Somehow the drake is immune to its effects, but everything else—I shudder at the memories. The substance eats through my Blood Liquid and True Silver Array, widening the hole in the mesh with steaming hisses. I double down, trying to kill the dragon before it can escape—I clench my teeth and turn my focus to the creature’s wings. Maybe the flesh there is softer. The Blood Liquid disperses over the massive creature’s body toward the appendages. The dragon simultaneously falls through the True Silver Array as its meshed structure fails to continue to support the dragon's weight due to the caustic acid.
The lizard tumbles freely through space for a few hundred meters before its wings catch the air. I am still digging at it with my Blood spell and working on perforating those wings, as it refolds them and flees to Earth. The farther it goes, the less I feel the liquid. I sneer as I see it crash through the forest canopy and disappear. Closing my eyes, I suck in a deep lungful of air through my nose and change gears; time to assess the damage. That hole will take at least a month to repair, but more importantly for me, I’ve consumed my entire store of specialized Blood liquid. That trick is why I am a top ranker, and to be bottomed out leaves me weak, vulnerable. I can’t even call the outcome of that battle a success, as the dragon escaped. All of this just reminds me how humans are falling further and further behind. Partly because of the monster power creep, but partly because of human politicking. . .
“Dammit, why did the Sabres Guild call us back so soon? We just got our cities situated in a relatively safe area in the wilds,” I spit behind me to Graydon. His cheeks are red, and I worry that he is somehow embarrassed at his lack of contribution.
“Thank you for joining me,” I say as I move to his side. I place a hand on his shoulder; I am incredibly proud of the boy for joining me up here for the attack. He may not have been helpful in the fight but that was because of his B-2 rating. He only just formed his Sea of Liquid inside his organ’s pocket dimension. Sometimes it’s hard for me to remember what it’s like to be anything other than an S-7 and a top-tier ranker. I literally have an entire ecosystem inside that pocket dimension, and it’s wondrous to behold. But above that, my family is my greatest blessing; I would never give them up.
“And for the Guild to command the thousand chosen rankers to bring their Elysium Cities to Aresmont as well. I haven’t ever heard of anything like this before?” Graydon says as his nearly identical father lands on my balcony. I turn my head to him and study the small differences between my son and husband.
Strangely, they look like they could be brothers. The coming of God Organs and Liquid has kept anyone from aging in a hundred years. It even reverses aging to no small degree. So, like me, Nathan still looks twenty-five despite his actual age of one hundred and thirty-two. My son is thirty-two and was a perfect century present for Nathan. Coming from the Old World, Nathan and I often find this particular phenomenon a bit eerie. It’s also fantastic and wonderful, but there is something about our mindset: It comes from a time when people knew they would grow old and die. We just never expected to be standing next to our own son in our primes.
“Tell me that wasn’t your whole store of specialized mana, babe?” Nathan asks, and I shrug. He likes to call liquid ‘mana,’ and granted, his description of the game resource almost fits. The sharp edges of that description which refuse to join; come from the storage organ and how you must cultivate the liquid from the sun, moon, or food. Admittedly, he was a bit jealous of me for discovering a way to make a spell—one that used to bottom out my ‘mana’—only cost twenty percent of it.
“You better be careful calling it mana, Nathan. Once we reach Aresmont and the Northern Tower, the church will have a strong presence,” Graydon says, mimicking both my voice and the way in which I was about to scold his father. I turn to the boy and stick my tongue out playfully. That rascal got me.
“I did use all of my specialized liquid. How else were we going to kill that dragon?” I say to Nathan. He only smiles in response before returning my shrug from earlier. He doesn’t know either, it seems.
“We might have been able to drive it away in time,” he offers, but I can tell he doesn’t really believe it.
Our group of Sabres members and the five Elysium Cities are flying over the wilds, an area of the world almost inaccessible to humans anymore. Even flying thousands of meters above it, and with a few top-twenty rankers, we are at risk out here. I stand up and walk back to the balcony, looking over the lush landscape. I used to take my dogs for walks in areas like that when I was studying for my bachelor’s degree. I wish I could walk through the deep wilderness again, but only some well-maintained areas are accessible now.
I truly love the deep wilds, and sometimes wish I were a hunter instead of an adventurer turned ranker. I would rather be clearing areas of the wilds than go into the Tower again. I’ve lost too many friends to it already. I feel arms slide around me from over my shoulders and know that they’re Nathan’s. I grab his triceps and give a light squeeze. He knows me better than I sometimes do. He must sense my train of thought.
“Trying to go to your happy place?” he whispers into my ear, and I swallow the lump that it causes to form in my throat.
“I don’t like this, the whole Tower thing,” I whisper, admitting to him and myself that the idea of taking on the fifty-first to the sixtieth floor of the Tower terrifies me.
“I know. We put our votes in and said our piece when the Guild last brought up this subject. Our names came out of the hat, though, Leanne. . .” he responds softly, rocking me back and forth, clearly at a loss for how to make it better.
I don’t know how either. All I know is that we will arrive a
t the new city of Aresmont and the strange mechanical Northern Tower that sprouted from the Earth on the day of The Rise. Then we will enter because that is what the Guild told us to do.
“Why do they think a thousand rankers can do what the strongest in the past couldn’t?” I say, a bit of my anger tinging my words and raising the volume.
“Do you think you can tell your grandkids about the days leading up to The Rise? It might be their last opportunity to hear the tale for a while,” Graydon asks. I can hear the clear attempt at distraction in his voice. Being this old, having grandkids and the feelings I do for them, I know that all I have to do is let them near me. And his intended distraction will work.
“Absolutely, we would love to,” I say, burying that anger deep. It wouldn’t do to let the angels see our distress. I grab my husband’s arm, and we leave the top level of the skyscraper.
“One hundred years ago, the Earth I knew changed,” I begin, infusing a few individual drops of liquid to enhance my voice and make the story more dramatic. “I was twenty-five, obsessed with my dog Luna, my tiny apartment, and my new job. The end of our world”—I gesture theatrically to my husband—“began with a rather innocuous internal growth. It occurred within every living creature on the planet and doctors—”