Bugs and Loopholes: A LitRPG Adventure (Beta Tester Book 3)

by Rachel Ford

  He nodded. His first instinct was to get away from the stench. But he could see glimmering gems and gold jewelry on the dead. So he delved in, digging through the corpses to loot them of their valuables. Jordan watched, smirking, but didn’t join him. “You’re a scavenger,” she said. “A carrion bird.”

  “Bird of prey, you mean. Like an eagle.”

  She scoffed. “More like a turkey vulture.”

  He was going through the bodies and grabbing all available items without paying much heed to details. He figured he could sort through his haul once he was away from the smell of its former owners. The alerts swarmed him.

  Added to inventory: fine hat

  Added to inventory: elegant gloves

  Added to inventory: moldy bread

  And so on. So he didn’t pay them much mind, until a cheery tone sounded.

  Side quest started: Finders, Keepers

  Objective: keep the Blasey family ring [optional]

  Objective: return the Blasey family ring [optional]

  Jack froze. “Wait, what was that?”

  “A new quest,” Jordan said. “Something about rings.”

  She pulled up her quest log, which put her character into a suspended state. He knew that’s what she was doing because she stood there, exactly as she had been a moment ago, with faint white text hovering over her head: Reviewing Quest Log

  “Huh. Looks like you picked up some kind of signet ring belonging to the Blasey family, in Kaldstein. Looks like they’re one of the big families in the city. I guess Janis Blasey there considered himself something of an adventurer. He went missing three weeks ago. Well, we know what happened to him. Anyway, he had the family ring with him. They would like it back.”

  Jack recalled his ignominious departure – including the gaping hole in the Kaldstein fortress. “Yeah…returning it might be something of a problem.”

  “There’s probably a reward in it if you do. The log says ‘The Blaseys are known to be powerful allies.’”

  Despite himself, the summary piqued Jack’s interest. He knew how these quests worked. If the family would be willing to pay to get the ring back, there’d probably be a good reason why Jack wouldn’t want to return it. Maybe they were skinflints, and would give him less than one of the merchants. He pulled up his inventory, and sifted through until he reached the Blasey family signet ring.

  It was a big, ugly thing that weighed almost half a pound – a monstrous weight for a ring. Its estimated resale value came in at a measly fifteen gold pieces. That puzzled him – until he noticed the ring’s secondary attributes: unknown enchantment.

  “Hey,” he said, “this thing’s enchanted. You mind if I use one of the discovery scrolls on it?”

  “They’re yours. Do what you want with them.”

  So he did, and a thought flashed through his mind.

  Ring enchantment discovered: kiss of death. Protects wearer from werewolf and vampire bites.

  Jack smiled. “Well, I have good news for the Blaseys, and bad news.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The good news is, we know what happened to Janis. The bad news is, they ain’t getting that ring back.”

  They continued their search. Twice, Jack picked up so many items that he ran out of storage capacity. The first time, he offloaded fifty pounds of clothes to Jordan. The second time, she refused to help him further. “Get rid of some of your junk, you packrat.”

  “I’m not a packrat, Jordan. But if we run across a merchant, I can sell all of this.”

  “We’re headed into the wilderness, not back to town. So stop being a hoarder, and prioritize what you’re keeping and what you’re not.”

  In the end, he had to toss a wardrobe’s worth of expensive clothing, a set of armor, and a few weapons. He protested the entire time, and she laughed at him. “You’re exactly the reason we put such a limit on inventory space. You know that, right? It was players like you.”

  They were petty tyrants obsessed with micromanaging player’s play styles. He told her so in unflinching terms. She just laughed again.

  They covered seven levels, clearing skeletons, hell hounds, and zombies too. Finally, they reached the eighth and lowest floor. It could only be accessed via the rickety wooden steps. So Jack went first, taking one ginger step after the other, and they arrived without incident.

  The air was mustier and closer here than it had been on the higher levels, and warmer too. Jack glanced around. There were pickaxes and shovels, wheelbarrows and dirt piles. He saw a bedroll and bench made out of old crates, and a table of similar construction. He ignored the apple and bread sitting on it. He didn’t care if it was just a game. He sure as hell wasn’t going to eat anything from a place that smelled the way this one did.

  Jordan pointed to the tunnel entrance. “There’s only one here. It’s got to be where we’re headed.”

  He nodded. “The necromancer.”

  They crossed the open ground, and peered into the tunnel. The same orange torchlight that had illuminated the entire structure glowed out at them, but sparser than above. Despite the temperature, Jack shivered. “Well…I suppose we should go.”

  Jordan gestured at the passage. “After you.”

  “Oh no. Ladies first.”

  She opened her mouth to respond, but a noise echoed out of the tunnel – something like a wolf’s howl, but more hair raising. He’d heard that sound before. “Sugar. It’s werewolves.”

  Jordan drew a sword with one hand, and conjured up a fireball in the other. “What is this place, some kind of sanctuary of the undead and cursed?”

  “I guess. Let’s see how they like cold steel.”

  They didn’t. Jack had barely taken two steps when he ran smackdab into a werewolf – a great, towering monster, stalking along half-erect, half hunched forward. Its monstrous paws dangled at its sides, and its razor sharp claws gleamed in the torchlight. It had been ducking out of a low doorway. Jack swung his blade, and Jordan loosed a fireball. Together, they felled the monster in about fifteen seconds.

  It was good teamwork. But not good enough to stop it from screaming out in pain and alarm. Roars and shrieks and howls sounded all through the tunnels. “Crikey. They’re all on the alert.”

  Jordan pointed toward the room the now dead monster had come from. “Let’s check that out. Clear it out if it’s occupied, and hole up there for a bit. We can kill anything that tries getting through the doorway.”

  He nodded, and ducked into the room. And immediately regretted it. It was a cross between a butcher’s shop and a torture chamber. Blood pooled all over the floor, and coated the walls. Splatters and smears reached the ceilings, and ran along crevices and cracks in the stone. Brutal instruments – hooks and saws and cleavers – were littered here and there; and, lest there be any doubt as to their purpose, they were all covered in blood. Chunks of human flesh and humanoid remains lined a crude wooden countertop at the far end of the room, and bones and stray parts dotted tables. Some were in bowls or on plates, as if they’d been served that way. Some just lay there, bleeding and oozing where they sat.

  The reek of blood hit Jack’s nostrils, and he vomited on the spot. He heard Jordan clashing with a baddy behind him. But he was too busy purging his guts to be of any assistance. Whoever had been in charge of the in-game smells, he decided, was a raging psychopath. Realism was all well and good, within boundaries. This, though, had gone well beyond what any normal person would consider reasonable.

  By time he’d puked up everything still left in his stomach and staggered toward the door, Jordan had already dispatched of her opponent. It was another zombie: a half decayed mass of flesh that smelled like rot and death. Jack had to fight to keep his stomach steady. He pushed out of the room, past the dead. He didn’t care if there was loot somewhere behind him, or on the dead werewolf or zombie. He ran past them until the air was clean enough to breathe without gagging.

  “Let’s not…hole up…there.”

  “You okay?”
/>
  “Okay? Jordan, you’re not playing the full VR experience.”

  She shook her head. “It’s pretty grim?”

  “Grim? It’s a frickin’ nightmare. The smell is horrible.”

  She glanced away. “Not that I’m unsympathetic – but, incoming!”

  She was right. A whole horde of enemies was descending on their position. He counted four hell hounds in the lead, two zombies behind, then half a dozen skeletons, and four werewolves after that.

  “Now would have been a really good time to use that atomic fireball.”

  “Too bad I had to waste it saving your ungrateful backside.”

  They cut through the hell hounds easily enough. They were low level opponents, and though their teeth could do serious damage, they died quickly. The zombies were a little harder, and a lot more disgusting, thanks to the odor. But there were only two of them, and they weren’t very smart: they just blundered in, groaning and moaning and swinging their revolting, rotting appendages.

  Jack cut through them with a vengeance borne of revulsion. Then he focused on the skeletons. They clacked and clattered away angrily, their bony hands ready to strike. He used fireballs until they got too close, then he resorted to his sword. The passage was narrow here, and he and Jordan fought shoulder to shoulder, so nothing could get past them, or behind them. He took one hit, but managed to otherwise escape unscathed.

  Jordan poured fire into the werewolves, and her attacks staggered them. Jack dove in for the kills while they were incapacitated. One after the other, he cut through them all.

  “Nice work,” she said.

  He nodded, still a little shaky from the grotesque feeding stations he’d seen earlier, but invigorated after battle. “We make an alright team.”

  “Come on. If memory serves, there’s only a few more chambers. We’ve got to be close to the end.”

  They walked on, finding and looting a bedroom. There was a desk in here, with a journal. Jack read it. It consisted of many pages of notes, detailing someone called Argantulum’s descent into madness. Not that Argantulum would have called himself mad. On the contrary, he would have – in fact, did, repeatedly – call himself a genius. And not just a genius. He was a visionary, a man whose mind was unshackled by social mores, a man too great for his time; the wisest of men.

  Among the rambling and ego, though, he gathered that Argantulum had been a scientist who sought to understand magic via the scientific method. He dabbled for a time in the dark arts, until dabbling became a full-time pursuit, and then an all-engrossing obsession. Necromancy was his particular field of study, and he’d perfected his work until he could raise all kinds of undead. “Apparently, he’s the nutjob we have to thank for the animate corpses everywhere,” he told Jordan. “He’s trying to figure out the ‘science of necromancy.’”

  It wasn’t until the last two pages, though, that he found anything really interesting. One line on the second to last page said, “Running out of test subjects again. Vestervel promised to go hunting. I’ll have to make sure Craluda keeps his hands off the prey this time.”

  The last page was dated a week ago, two days after the prior entry.

  “Vestervel returned with a mother and child. But he has taken it into his head to try his own hand at passing on his curse. The damned fool. It’s Craluda’s fault, of course. She won’t stop turning the test subjects. It’s better in her case, at least: they’re still undead, even if it is done outside the scientific method. Vestervel’s curse is just that – a curse.

  “Still, I told him he can have one, like a pet. But only one. I have serious scientific research to conduct, and I have not the time to suffer these fools their petty indulgences. I’m going to have to start taking a firm hand with the both of them.”

  “Sounds like a boss fight coming up,” Jack said. “Three bosses really: the big guy and his two lieutenants.”

  They moved on to another bedroom. This one was larger and more spacious, with a great mirror across from the open door, reflecting an empty room. Jack marched in, saying, “Coast’s clear.” Jordan followed.

  Then the door slammed shut behind them. They spun around to find themselves facing a tall, pale man with long, gleaming fangs. “Velcome,” he said, “to ze last minutes of your life.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Vampire, Jack thought. It wasn’t the fact that he’d been invisible in the mirror, or the pallor of his skin, or even the oversized fangs that gave it away. It was the ridiculous, over-the-top, cheesy accent: classic Marshfield Studio stuff.

  He swung his sword at the monster. He was within striking distance, and he put a lot of force into the blow. He didn’t expect a one-hit kill, but he figured he’d deal some serious damage.

  Instead, he did no damage. The man dispersed into a cloud of bats. They flitted this way and that, screeching and screaming.

  “Bat swarm,” Jordan called. “Brace yourself.”

  He didn’t know what she meant, but he quickly learned. The bats did indeed swarm him, attacking his face and head primarily. But his arms and legs and torso all took damage too, as a hundred vicious teeth tore into him. He could feel his health meter ebbing away slowly, leaking with every tiny jab.

  A fireball whizzed past him. The bat swarm screeched, and shifted back into the man’s shape. It didn’t remain still, though. It bared its fangs and leaped forward, straight for Jack’s neck.

  Jack tried to contort his upper body out of the way, and to bring his sword to bear. But the vampire was too quick. It grabbed his sword arm in one massive hand, and clamped down hard on it. Then, it leaned in and bit his neck.

  Jack felt an instant loss of health points. A thought entered his mind.

  Curse of vampirism warded off by Blasey family signet ring.

  He breathed out, grateful that he’d decided to steal the monstrous heirloom – and been sensible enough to equip it. And then he wrenched free of the vampire, and brought his blade up with a swift, terrible blow.

  The monster’s head rolled from its shoulders, and then the whole creature – head and body together – dissipated into a pile of dust before their eyes.

  “Well…that was intense,” Jordan said.

  Jack rubbed his neck. He could feel blood trickling from the wound. “You’re telling me.”

  “We’re going to need to find you a cure. Otherwise, you’re going to turn into a vampire. You’ll need to feed regularly, and it’ll have negative relationship effects. Most people don’t like vampires. Unless you want to play as a villain, I mean. The wrong kind of people – or the right, depending on your point of view – will view you as an asset.”

  He grinned though, and held up his hand to show off the gaudy bauble. “Nope. This thing warded off the curse.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Sweet.”

  They sifted through the vampire’s remains and swept the bedroom for loot. They found an elixir of invisibility and a three shot, steampunk style revolver full of silver bullets. Jack laughed. “Guess someone doesn’t trust his team.”

  Jordan took the weapon, since his inventory was close to capacity again. She admired it for a minute before slipping it into her own pack. “This is beautiful.” And it was. Jack was no kind of firearms expert. His eyes glazed over when gun nerds started to debate the finer points of specific calibers or gun models. He couldn’t have told you the difference between a cartridge or a shell. And though he’d used probably just about every type of gun ever invented, he’d never touched one outside of videogames. His knowledge was a casual blend of reality and fantasy. He’d used all kinds of shotguns, pistols, revolvers, and long guns, conventional firearms and laser guns, rocket launchers, plasma cannons, and so on. He’d stormed beaches carrying an M1 Garand, and he’d rushed alien fortifications carrying a handheld cannon that shredded its victims with yellow-painted shrapnel projectiles that bore a smiley face. If the human mind had dreamed it, Jack had probably used it.

  So, in his way,
he was both ignorant and well-versed when it came to guns. And in his measured opinion, this was a very fine firearm. It was crafted entirely out of some kind of enchanted silver that buzzed with demon slaying energy, in a double-action, swing out cylinder design. The cylinder itself was basically an equilateral triangle of the three chambers, each set at sixty degree angles, but with convex sides that gave it a slightly rounded appearance. The grip was some kind of ivory, and every free inch of the thing had either been cast or engraved with intricate designs. The hammer swirled back in a long, elegant curlicue design – heavy and broad for function’s sake, and ornate for form’s.

  But it had only three shots, and weighed several pounds. Jack knew himself well enough to know he could never part with it at a merchant, if it was his own; and with only three bullets, he’d never fire it either. He’d hold onto it, waiting for the right time. So, essentially, he’d be wasting that much of his inventory.

  Better Jordan’s problem than his.

  They moved on to other chambers. They found more bedrooms, some inhabited by werewolves or vampires, and some empty. They dispatched of the monsters, and kept going. They came across a kind of arena, with a great iron cage in the center. Dried, brown blood stained the floor and the bars. A few hell hounds were still in the cage, and so was a manacled human skeleton, the flesh of which had mostly been picked away by now. Jack didn’t need to go into the room and risk another vomiting episode. But he did draw his bow, and dispatch the hounds.

  They moved on. “We have to be getting close,” Jordan said.

  He nodded. “I hope so. This place is frickin’ creepy.”

  And it was. He’d seen more than his fair share of dungeons and lairs. He’d played with VR headsets before, where the monsters had seemed real and life-like at the time. But he’d never actually lived it before. It was the difference between watching a movie, and living the adventure yourself. Even when the monsters looked real, look was as bad as it got. This world provided stimuli to every sense. So when it got creepy, it got creepy on a whole new level. Jack was pretty sure the only thing keeping him from losing his shit was the knowledge in the back of his brain that – no matter what it felt like – it wasn’t real. And there were increasingly more moments lately when that proved only just enough.