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

by Rachel Ford

  But then, he reminded himself that this harmless old coot had been anything but harmless. He kills people. Tortures them. Concluding that the old man deserved to die, he stuck his hand into his pocket.

  And then Argantulum’s eyes opened. He reached a bony hand up, swift and strong, his fingers twisted into talons. The whole business took Jack by surprise. He had only a chance to yelp before the talons seized around his neck, and started to squeeze his windpipe.

  Then, he found himself wheezing and fighting for dear life. The old man, even after his defeat, was strong as hell. He showed no mercy, either. Jack hammered at his arms, and he squeezed harder.

  Then he remembered that he had a dagger in his pack, and he reached for it. Striking blindly, again and again, at the form that had only a moment ago inspired such pity, Jack killed Argantulum – for good. He collapsed onto the wizard’s now blood soaked body, wheezing and choking.

  Only then did Jordan notice anything out of the ordinary. She glanced out from behind the altar and gasped. “What the heather?”

  Jack rasped out an explanation, and she rushed over. The boy’s wails reached higher pitches yet. She pulled him up off the dead body, and fussed for a minute.

  He didn’t mind that, exactly. He wasn’t used to people fussing about him. His own mother had shown only the mildest concern for his run of the mill childhood injuries, and his father just laughed them off. Well, that’ll teach you to be a klutz, won’t it? So fussing was certainly an unfamiliar sensation; but not an unpleasant one.

  She probed the bruising on his throat with her gauntleted fingers. It didn’t hurt, but she didn’t like the look of it anyway. “I haven’t seen that before.”

  “What?”

  “Bruising.”

  “Well, it’s just the damage system, right?”

  She shook her head, holding up her shiny, armored forearm so that he could see the discoloration reflected back at him. “No. Unless they rolled out something that I’m not aware of.”

  He shrugged. “It doesn’t hurt, so that’s got to be it.”

  Jordan frowned, but nodded slowly. “I guess. I’ll ask Nate or the medical team later. But in the meantime…” She fished out a healing potion. “Take this.”

  He did, and drank it down. His health had fallen pretty low, so he was glad of the boost. She, meanwhile, watched the bruises recede, and the creases on her forehead relaxed with it. Then, she turned her attention to Argantulum. He sat for a moment and caught his breath while she fished through the dead man’s pockets.

  “Got it,” she said, producing a large iron key. “And…holy crap. Check it out.” Now, she produced a gnarled wizard’s staff.

  “What’s that?”

  “A staff of reanimation.”

  He blinked. “You mean…to raise the dead?”

  She grinned, quite pleased with the discovery. “Yup.”

  She got to her feet while Jack sat there gaping, and pointed the staff at the dead wizard. A rush of red and purple magic leaped from it, and Argantulum twitched.

  Jack yelped and scurried backwards, instinctively drawing his dagger again. But a thought flashed through his mind as the blood-soaked body raised slowly, moaning as it went.

  Undead follower added to your party: Argantulum the wizard

  “Wait, he works for you now?”

  Jordan grinned at him. “I guess so.”

  “Oh humbug. How come you get the staff of reanimation?”

  “Don’t whine,” she snorted. “You got whatever those two had.”

  “Yeah, but he was the main boss.”

  “But you got twice as much stuff.” He scowled at her, and she shrugged. “Come on. We need to save the kid.”

  He followed, but paused at the chest. He glanced between her and it. She had her back to him. It would take all of two seconds to swipe the loot for himself.

  He hesitated. She was still en route to the altar, her attention fixed on the kid. Hell with it, he decided. He was the one stuck in the game, after all. He needed this stuff more than she did. So he reached out to lift the lid, slow and quiet.

  A bolt of lightning arced up through the chest, jolting through him with an energy that stunned every sense. Then, Jack’s world went dark.

  Chapter Sixteen

  He blinked up at Jordan’s face a moment later. Or, maybe it had been longer. He couldn’t tell. “Did I…die?”

  She shook her head. “No. The chest was boobytrapped. It knocked you out.” She frowned, brushing soot off him. “And you took some damage.”

  He glanced at his health meter. He’d lost about a third of his hitpoints. “Sugar. That was quite the trap.” Then, he thought it best to add, lest she thought he had been trying to rob her, “I must have brushed it as I passed, or something.”

  She didn’t acknowledge the remark, although a shadow of skepticism crossed her features. But she stayed focused on something on his arm. He glanced down, and then gaped. His glove was off – presumably, removed by Jordan – and a bright red burn mark reached up his palm, and up his arm. “What the heather?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t like it, though. You’re sure this doesn’t hurt?” Gingerly, she placed her own now bared fingers on his wound.

  Jack shook his head. “Not at all.”

  “That’s good, at least. But I don’t like it. It’s like your body is starting to reflect the actual damage you take.”

  He shrugged. “Does it matter? I mean, as long as I don’t feel any pain, right?”

  She nodded slowly. “I guess. I hope.”

  He pushed himself up, and slipped on his gloves. Then, he flexed his fingers, just to verify that he didn’t feel any pain. “Nope. Nothing.”

  She got to her feet, and offered him a hand. “Okay. We should move.”

  “Yeah.” He stood and stared at the chest. “How are we going to get that open without cooking?”

  “Oh, I already did.”

  He blinked. “What?”

  “Yeah, while you were out. It was a one-time trap. You absorbed it. I just took what I wanted.” She shrugged, like it had been no big deal.

  Jack opened his mouth to protest, but then thought better of it. His burn marks had been a little too telltale. His story about an accidental brush against the chest wouldn’t hold water. So whining about her collecting the items after he meant to do it behind her back might provoke some unwanted questions or recriminations. He said instead, “Well, let’s go rescue that poor little boy, eh?”

  Jordan nodded, and they headed toward the still wailing kid. She unfastened his legs and then passed the key to Jack. He took it gingerly. “Me?”

  “Get his hands.”

  He bit down on the urge to protest that he didn’t want anything to do with babysitting. He was nearer the kid’s arms, so it made sense. Even if that kid was covered in filth and blood and spit and snots. Hell, he thought, wrinkling his nose as he bent toward the shackles. He even stinks. Marshfield Studio really had taken realism a little too far.

  He turned the lock on the right shackle with a loud click. The boy’s hand slipped out. Argantulum, meanwhile, groaned out some kind of magical incantation behind them, and a light appeared above their heads.

  “Yeah, that’s not freaky at all,” he grumbled, moving to the last lock.

  It clicked with the same loud sound, and the irons fell away. The little boy was still screaming. Jack could feel a headache coming on behind his eyes. Jordan, meanwhile, was trying to convince the kid that everything was okay. And, through it all, a series of thoughts flashed through his mind.

  The Boy Who Cried Wolf quest update

  Objective complete: find the missing child

  Objective added: reunite mother and child

  “Alright,” Jack said, a little brusquely, “let’s get him to his mom. It’s a long –”

  He was going to comment on the length of the climb ahead of them. He didn’t get that far, though. The boy had pulled his feet free from the shackles, glanced at his loose
wrists, and then – well, Jack wasn’t quite sure what had happened. One minute, he’d been staring at a whining, snot-nosed kid, sniveling on the altar. And the next, the kid stared back at him with a hellish gaze. He parted his lips in a vicious snarl to reveal a mouth full of razor sharp fangs. Worse, his wailing turned into a blood curdling growl. His tiny arms bulged as ropes of new muscle formed. His pale, dirty skin made way for a hirsute, leathery hide, and his fingernails made way for razor sharp claws. All in all, the boy seemed to have doubled or tripled in size in the blink of an eye.

  “Mother trucker,” Jack yelled, leaping backward and adding most unnecessarily, “He’s a werewolf.”

  At the same time, the little werewolf leaped off the altar, straight for Jack; and a quest update invaded his thoughts.

  The Boy Who Cried Wolf quest update

  Objective added: kill or cure the child

  At the moment, Jack was too busy scrambling backwards away from the bared teeth and ferocious growling to pay much attention to anything. Still, something about killing a kid didn’t quite sit right with him.

  Jordan, meanwhile, seemed to have the same idea. “Kill him? What the heather?”

  The kid moved faster than Jack, and it landed on his arm. He felt fangs chomp into his flesh, and health drain from his hitpoint meter.

  Argantulum cried out, “You will rue the day you crossed blades with Argantulum the Great.”

  Then, fireballs rained down on Jack. He assumed the wizard was trying to kill the kid and not him, but he wasn’t entirely sure. He was too busy swatting the little brat away – and enduring repeated bites as a consequence. His health dropped like a rock, and the game alerted him half a dozen times,

  Curse of lycanism warded off by Blasey family signet ring.

  “The little bastard’s going to kill me,” he warned Jordan, although it came out as the little tyke. It didn’t help that Argantulum’s fireballs hit him more than the kid.

  Jordan, meanwhile, was sorting through her rucksack a bit frantically. Finally, she whipped out a crossbow and some kind of enchanted arrow. He couldn’t tell what the enchantment was, but he could see a magical swirl around the arrowhead. She fired, and the enchanted projectile hit the boy’s back. He froze, then collapsed off of Jack.

  “Son-of-a-biscuit. He almost killed me.” A slight exaggeration – he still had more than half his health – but the boy had done serious damage.

  “Sugar,” she said. “He must be the one Vestervel was turning. That will keep him paralyzed for a few minutes, but we’re going to have to find a way to cure him.”

  “Cure him?” Jack snorted. Surveying the extent of the damage he’d taken cured him somewhat of the misgivings he’d felt earlier about the quest options.

  So he was about to suggest they just kill him when she nodded. “We can’t just kill him.”

  “Oh. No, of course not. Right. Cure him.”

  Argantulum, though, seemed to have missed the memo. The wizard moved rightward, so that he had a clear line of sight to the unmoving boy, and shouted, “You will rue the day you crossed blades with Argantulum the Great. Die, villain!”

  The tiny werewolf shuddered under the first fireball, and Jordan gasped, throwing herself over the downed boy’s body. Jack didn’t feel particularly compelled to intercede until the next round of fire hit her. “Cheese and rice,” he yelled, jumping for the wizard. “You’re hitting Jordan, you dingbat.” Neither of his curses had translated as intended, but he didn’t care. The point was, Jordan had been taking serious damage. And as he plowed into the frail old man, his shots went far and wide.

  Jack got back to his feet, ranting angrily at the wizard, who picked himself up off the ground repeating, “You will rue the day you crossed blades with Argantulum the Great. Die, villain!”

  “Leave the kid alone, dagnabbit,” he shouted.

  But Jack needn’t have worried. Argantulum had lost interest in the little werewolf. As an undead minion beholden to Jordan, his loyalty was to her party. But his primary loyalty, even in undeath, was to himself. So when Jack shoved him to the ground, the NPC registered that as an attack. Maybe the fall had done some damage. Maybe it was just the aggression inherent to the act.

  Either way, the villain Argantulum had in mind wasn’t the paralyzed werewolf child. It was Jack. Which he learned about half a second later, when a devastating fireball swept into him.

  His health plummeted, and Jordan started yelling at the wizard to desist. But Argantulum didn’t. He rained down fireballs on the pair of them, and started chanting the same refrain he’d used to raise the dead before.

  Jack, meanwhile, ducked behind the altar and cast his healing spell. “Sugar. I think he thinks I attacked him, Jordan.”

  “We’re going to have to kill him again.”

  “Mother trucker.”

  He jumped out of his hiding place and returned fire. The fight took a good, long time like it always did. Death had done nothing to weaken the wizard, it seemed. But they defeated him a final time, and he collapsed to the ground, good and truly dead.

  Jordan drew her staff of resurrection, and then cursed. “I can’t resurrect him a second time.”

  Jack figured this was a good thing. “He was kind of a turncoat anyway.”

  “That’s because you hit him.”

  “He hit you first.”

  “Yeah, but he must have registered it as an attack. It would have switched his party loyalties.”

  “That’s a dumb feature,” Jack decided.

  She shook her head. “We had to do it. Otherwise, people would power level by killing docile, rezed NPC’s. It’s a shame we lost him, though. He would have been a powerful ally.”

  Jack grunted a noncommittal sound, and glanced back at the kid. “Uh…Jordan? We’ve got a problem.”

  He was staring at empty floor where the kid had been a minute before.

  “Fiddlesticks,” she said. “The paralysis potion must have worn off. We need to find him. And I’ve only got one more potion.”

  Jack groaned, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Maybe we should just kill him.” She shot him a look so fierce, he laughed awkwardly and lied, “Just kidding.”

  “It’s not funny.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Come on. We have to find him, and figure out how to cure him.”

  “And how are we going to do that?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. But we have to figure something out.”

  A snarl from about halfway up one of the earthen pillars necessarily postponed further conversation. Jack glanced up and shivered. The little demon kid was hanging from the pillar by his claws, staring down at them with eyes that blazed with red hellfire. “Uh…found him.”

  He pointed toward the pillar, but he needn’t have. She was already staring at him. “He’s too far up. I can’t shoot him when he’s up there.”

  Jack glanced at her, then the kid. “Really? I can hit him from here.”

  “I don’t mean the range is a problem. I mean, if he falls from there, he could get really hurt.”

  “Oh. Yeah. That’d be…bad.”

  She nodded. “We have to lure him down.”

  “How?”

  “One of us has to go toward the pillar.”

  He snorted. “Yeah, I’m not being bait. Sorry.”

  She frowned at him, then handed over her crossbow and a magical arrow. “Fine, I’ll do it. But you better hit. You’ve only got one shot.”

  Jack frowned back at her. “Are you serious?”

  “You have a better idea?”

  “Yes. But you won’t like it.”

  “It better not be killing him.”

  “Okay. Then I don’t have a better idea.”

  “Take the bow.”

  “Dagnabbit, Jordan,” he growled, “keep your stupid bow. I’ll go be bait.”

  She nodded. “Good. I’m the better shot.”

  “Like heather.”

  “Just go.”

  So he
squared his shoulders and did, keeping a wary eye on the little monster. The kid snarled and growled and hissed. “Oh shut up, you little brat,” he muttered. “This is going to hurt me worse than you.”

  “What?” Jordan called.

  “Oh, uh, nothing.”

  “Okay. You have to get closer.”

  “‘You have to get closer,’” he repeated, his tone a little softer. “Go on, Jack. Go be a chew toy for some rabid little –”

  He didn’t finish. The wolf child leaped down from the pillar – which, in his mind, demonstrated that the height hadn’t been that big of a deal after all – and sank his teeth into Jack’s shoulder.

  He heard Jordan shoot at the same time the game alerted him,

  Curse of lycanism warded off by Blasey family signet ring.

  The boy dropped off him a second time. Jack cast his healing spell again, offering a sour, “Well, that was fun.”

  Jordan paid him no never mind, though, focusing her sympathy on the downed kid. “How awful. He probably can’t even understand what’s going on. He’s just a baby.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Jordan…it’s a videogame. He’s not real.”

  She still ignored him. “We need to figure out how to save him. This potion isn’t going to keep him sedated long enough to get him back to his mom.”

  “Look, I hate to say it, but maybe there’s nothing we can do. Maybe stopping the spread of the curse is the best thing…” He trailed off as she turned a glare his way; but not because of the glare. She started to say something, but he shook his head. “Hold on. I have an idea.”

  She stared at him suspiciously. “It better not be –”

  “It isn’t.” He knelt down beside the kid, and slipped the oversized signet ring off his finger. Then, with grave misgivings, he lifted the werewolf paw and slipped the ring over one of the claws and up onto the finger as far as it would go.

  The boy transformed again. The ropes of sinew vanished, the hair receded, the claws and fangs evaporated. In their stead lay a tiny, dirty child with tear-stained cheeks. A slew of alerts flashed through his mind.

  The Boy Who Cried Wolf quest update

  Objective complete: cure the child