Four: The Loot: A LitRPG/Gamelit Novel (The Good Guys Book 4)

by Eric Ugland

  “It’s almost all granite,” I said, “at least out to 500 yards.”

  “You cast spells too?” Essie asked, hand on her hip and one perfect eyebrow arched over.

  “I have a few tricks up my sleeves.”

  “Interesting,” she replied, “I could not imagine much hiding up your sleeves given how your arms fit in them.”

  I was still wearing clothes I’d purchased all the way back in Arenberg, and considering that I’d put on a few pounds of muscle and magically grown a few inches, none of my clothing fit very well. The current shirt was popping a few seams here and there, and probably wouldn’t last a single fight.

  “They are small tricks,” I replied.

  “Oh, now now, I doubt anything about you is small.”

  “Duke Coggeshall,” came Nikolai’s voice a little louder than I think he intended, “we must needs focus on the tunnel.”

  “I can start the tunnel here,” Essie said, tapping on the rock wall in front of her, “but you tell me the ground is on a different level on the other side?”

  “Yeah, is that a problem?” I asked.

  “Not necessarily a problem,” she replied, back to looking at the stone, “but it requires more guessing on my part than I would prefer. If I get the angle wrong, I could wind up making the tunnel entrance well off the ground. Or miss ground level entirely and we will be stuck tunneling in perpetuity.”

  “Can you make a mark of some kind here and then, I don’t know, do what it is you do from the other side?”

  “Yes, I can mark the entrance here and ‘dig’ from the other side. How big do you want the tunnel?” Essie asked.

  “The ideal is so two wagons can pass,” I said.

  She focused on the cliff, then put her hands up. I saw a little bit of a glow around her fingers, and a line appeared on the wall. A curve about an inch deep marking the outlines of a tunnel, as if she had carved it into the rock face itself.

  Lee watched, mouth open. As soon as the marking was done, he walked up to it and did a few rough measurements using his arms and his footsteps.

  “Taller,” he said. “And you need to keep the curve more regular. This tunnel with have a lot of weight coming down on it.”

  “I will strengthen the stone as I go, elf,” Essie snapped. “I know my business.”

  “Hey now,” I said, putting my hands up. “He was just trying to offer some guidance.”

  “Guidance I have no need for.”

  “He’s in charge of logistics. So, you’ll be taking a fair number of your orders from him. Might as well be on his good side.”

  Essie stuck her tongue out at me.

  “I am on Lee’s good side,” she said.

  Lee shrugged. “We have a working relationship of sorts. And I don’t mind that she calls me elf, she’s just a stinky human, she can’t possibly know any better.”

  “Apologies,” I said to both of them. “Just don’t want to breed the racism we left.”

  “Noted,” Nikolai said. “All here are believers in equality amongst the races.”

  “Except gnomes,” Ragnar said. “Gnomes drool.”

  Both lutra laughed, but I missed the joke.

  While Essie and Lee worked out the tunnel dimensions, I looked over the rest of the group gathered there.

  “Ragnar, Skeld,” I said, “I want you two to be in charge of ranging, hunting, fishing, and foraging.”

  “Seems a lot,” Ragnar said.

  “Happy to do it, my lord,” Skeld said with a not-so-subtle spear butt smack to Ragnar’s ankle.

  “Thank you,” I replied, giving Skeld a slight bow. “Lee is taking logistics. Roads, tunnels, bridges. Nikolai, you’re my number two. When I’m not around, you are.”

  “Of course,” Nikolai said, “my lord.”

  “Nathalie,” I continued, “you are in charge of security. Set up the watch schedules, make sure everyone knows what to do in case of an attack, and make sure we get some sort of secure area set up for the kids.”

  She nodded.

  Emeline held up her hand. “Do I get a position?”

  “Morale,” I said. “I need you to make sure people are happy.”

  She shrugged. “I suppose that is something I can do.”

  “I believe in you,” I said, “and that leaves Tarryn.”

  “Oh, I have a job,” Tarryn said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I suppose you could appoint me differently, but if you have smarts, my lord, you will put me as second in command of security.”

  “That’s a gig you need to get from Nathalie. She’s in charge of that.”

  Nathalie looked deeply unhappy at having to work so closely with a user of magic. She glanced at me, and I nodded. So she nodded.

  “All right,” she said softly. “But no magic unless absolutely necessary.”

  Tarryn smiled, then raised a quick finger and shot off a tiny little firework thing that popped into a hundred little sparkles about ten feet up in the air.

  Nathalie’s face was pure murder.

  “Necessary,” Tarryn said. “For morale.”

  Tarryn gave Nathalie a big smile and then practically flounced away, whistling a little ditty.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Night came about as it usually does — some time after day and before morning. It was dark, as per the norm, and full of monsters. At least, it sounded that way. I knew there was at least one monster in the darkness. Fritz was out there somewhere.

  I was sitting with my back against a tree just a little outside the main grouping of wagons. We’d circled them, had a fire mostly down to coals in the middle, and there were sleeping forms all about. The workers, or those who weren’t in the ‘council,’ had spent their time in the afternoon unloading the wagons and getting our set-up into more of a livable state. Some of the group had set up their sleeping rolls inside the wagons, especially the dwarven families. But as the evening turned to night, most everyone shifted their sleeping spots to outside so they could see the stars and enjoy the fire longer into the night.

  As per the norm, I’d taken my leave of the group to be on my own. I’d been thinking about what Nikolai said, and it wasn’t any different than what I’d been thinking: I had to get the people who were following me to like me. Hell, best case scenario would be getting them to love me. But I felt like a fraud. I didn’t believe I was a person who deserved to be liked. Or loved.

  In trying to figure out why I felt that way, I’d come to an odd and disconcerting fact. It was because of who I was in my past life. My actions in this new life, as Montana Coggeshall, were mostly good. I hadn’t killed anyone who didn’t deserve it, or at least hadn’t been trying to kill me at the time. I’d saved quite a few people. Certainly the girls in the tower had been in a perilous position, right about to be raped and whatever else by the bandits. I’d rescued the lutra from slavery, rescued Emeline from prison, and saved Mouse and his family from squalor. On the whole, my actions could arguably paint me a hero. And yet, my previous life, the time as Nils, was infecting the one I had now. Had any of my actions been done out of true goodness? Or was I just overcompensating for Nils, and pretending I actually knew good from bad?

  I could sense Fritz’s feet padding across the ground, even though he made no noise whatsoever. That was the eerie thing about tremorsense. Unlike my other abilities, somehow it’d just slotted into my being, like it had always been there. I didn’t need to focus on it to ‘see’ what was happening — it was just there. If I did focus on it, I could get a better idea of where things were, of what was happening in the world around me. Like now, I could tell there were 17 worms of various sizes underneath me in the soil. And something burrowing, digging with claws towards the— and now there were 15 worms beneath me. And one creature happily munching dinner. Oh, and a monster about to pounce on me.

  “I know you’re there,” I said.

  The movement stopped.

  “Sneak-ing,” came the gruff reply.

  �
�Not sneaky enough I guess,” I said with a smile.

  The massive manticore took a seat next to me, looking over the camp. He smelled. Not bad — just a woodsy aroma, almost like pencil shavings. It was pleasant in its way, but this close, it was a little overpowering.

  “You bathe,” he said.

  “I was malodorous,” I replied.

  “Yes. Was stinky.”

  I shook my head to stifle a laugh. There was something delightfully ridiculous about a monster thinking I was smelly.

  “You up for meeting some of these people tomorrow?”

  “Eat-ing?”

  I looked at him, frowning.

  He looked at me, something along the lines of a smile on his freakish leonine face.

  “Joke,” he said. “Fam-i-ly. Eat no fam-i-ly.”

  “Right. I’m going to need you to ferry some of us over to the other side of this mountain. Through the canyon.”

  Fritz nodded. “Car-ry.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  He settled down, laying so that his massive head was across his giant paws, looking at the group in front of us.

  “Fam-i-ly,” he said, his voice low, gruff.

  “Yup.”

  “What is?”

  “What’s family?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s, I mean,” I stammered, trying to come up with an answer to a question I wasn’t sure I truly understood. Not in a way that would be satisfying to Fritz. Or, perhaps, any monster. Mainly because this wasn’t a biological family. And to be fair, it wasn’t a family of friends either. This was a group of people coming together to do something, mostly pulled by money. Slightly pulled by friendship. But family was a bit of a stretch. “It’s when a group decides they are together no matter what.”

  “Tribe?”

  “Closer than a tribe.”

  “Hrm.”

  “Uh, it means that, well, that no one is ever left behind. Or forgotten. That we are bound together, to help each other even when maybe we don’t want to.”

  “Fam-i-ly. Odd.”

  “Yeah, maybe, but it’s also a key element to, you know, life. At least for us.”

  He snorted, but continued to look out over the camp.

  “Fritz fam-i-ly?”

  “You know it,” I said.

  He raised his head up and looked over at me.

  “You are to me, big guy,” I said, meeting his gaze. “You are to me.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Fritz went to sleep at some point, I’m not exactly sure when. He’d spent a good deal of time just looking out over the camp, thinking.

  We were still at the tree, sitting above the camp on a slight hill, between the camp and the cliff. The wagons had been arranged neatly, wheels chocked to keep them in place. There was a kitchen of sorts set up near one of the fires, and a second fire that was just for socializing. Logs and rocks had been pulled over to make seats. It was a real camp. It had a quaintness to it.

  The manticore snored softly next to me, and I thought, for a moment, about petting his big mane, something I quickly decided was a bad idea. He was huge, and there were some serious spikes hidden within the fur. Spikes that seemed primed to deliver venom. I seemed to remember reading somewhere that Manticores were poisonous, and I figured it had to be in their spikes. Could be teeth. Whatever twisted god built the manticore (looking at you Typhon), they were definitely focused on creating something truly brutal.

  I’m not exactly sure what I thought would happen when people started to wake, but at no point was I expecting the screaming. I should have, seeing as most people considered meeting manticores a bad thing because, you know, manticores were known to eat people. I mean, hell, the name manticore means ‘man-eater.’ So rather obvious in retrospect, but at the time, I figured Fritz would look like a big ol’ fluff ball to everyone. A fluff ball of death.

  The screams came fast and loud as one of the children in the group caught sight of Fritz. Whomever it was dove back into their sleeping wagon with such a rush of speed that I couldn’t pick them out.

  Fritz was awake and looking around, almost as if he was trying to figure out what everyone else was busy screaming about. To be fair, I kind of was too.

  There was a sharp twang, and I heard the whistle of an arrow through the air.

  In that fraction of a second, I understood that someone was probably screaming at Fritz, and someone else was probably shooting at Fritz. I dove in front of the monster, and I was rewarded by my efforts with an arrow through my chest.

  I shouted a host of obscenities, and promptly got shot a second time.

  “Stop shooting!” I shouted.

  One more arrow went by, way overhead, and I finally saw that one of the dwarves had been firing at me (or Fritz, probably Fritz) and his last shot had gone wide after Ragnar snatched the bow from the guy.

  I grumbled, and looked down at the camp, seeing that everyone was quite awake, and glaring at me with a hearty mix of fear and disgust. Behind me, I heard Fritz moving, so I turned to give him a look.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  He nodded once, then sniffed at my bleeding torso.

  “You bleed,” he said through a growl.

  “I do.”

  “Bleed for me.”

  “Yeah, well,” I winced while trying to pull an arrow out, “better for me to deal with this than you.”

  The arrow wasn’t being super cooperative in that, it wasn’t coming out. I was super irritated.

  “Are these barbed arrows?” I shouted at the dwarf.

  He sheepishly looked at his arrows, then nodded at me.

  I gave the man a wicked smile. “Awesome,” I said.

  Then, I pushed the first one all the way through before reaching over my back to pull it the rest of the way out. It hurt. A lot. But there’s a surprising amount of pain you can withstand when you know that the pain is going to go away in a minute. The second one was pretty bad, so I had to walk down and get Ragnar to deal with it.

  He got a little too much joy out of it.

  I looked over the gathered group, and noticed they were all staring at Fritz.

  Fritz, in return seemed to care less about them, and, instead, was alternating between looking languidly at the sky and looking over at me. He had, in fact, dropped down again, so it looked like he was just lounging around.

  “That’s Fritz,” I said. “Fritz, this is the rest of our little family here, okay?”

  Fritz nodded his head, then laid it back across his giant paws.

  “Fritz is one of us,” I continued. “He is a friend.”

  “He is a monster,” the dwarf who shot me said.

  “Who here hasn’t been called a monster at some point?” I asked.

  All the hands went up with the notable exception of Emeline, Tarryn the WarMancer, and Essie the geomancer.

  “Okay, so mostly everyone. Sure, he’s a monster, but maybe let’s all look beyond that and see who he is on the inside,” I said, sweeping my arm back to gesture to what I thought would be a serenely sleeping beast.

  Fritz chose that moment to open his great maw wide and show off the seemingly endless rows of teeth.

  “Well, that’s one inside view,” Ragnar quipped.

  “You know what? Forget it — he’s part of the group, deal with it. Or, if you don’t want to, Osterstadt is that way,” I said, pointing.

  Ragnar pointed in the opposite direction.“Actually, it’s that way.”

  “Fuck all y’all.”

  Chapter Forty

  There was plenty of grumbling about Fritz from, well, everyone. But the manticore’s continued chill behavior and the addition of hot food to everyone’s stomachs seemed to diffuse the situation. It wasn’t long before the children of the group let their curiosity supersede their fear, and they approached the great big beast.

  Fritz seemed to enjoy the kids, letting them get close before opening a single eye and staring at them as they approached. I stood nearby, just in case. I
didn’t expecting Fritz to do something stupid, but it’d be a complete dealbreaker if one of the children got injured after I went through the whole speech about him being part of the family.

  After a few minutes, a game of sorts had formed between him and the children, sending the kids into fits of laughter. A little girl ran up to the manticore and gave him a big hug, and everyone sort of melted. Even Fritz.

  Nikolai, as normal, remained his glum self, coming over to me with nary a smile on his face.

  “Good morning, your grace,” he said. “I see you have decided to introduce your friend to us, finally.”

  “I have.”

  “Perhaps you might have your other hirð members watch over Fritz while you and I chat about strategy.”

  “Sure,” I said, and I pointed to Ragnar and Skeld, then at Fritz. They seemed to pick up on the cue, and Nikolai and I walked off towards the cliff face.

  Lee was already there, looking at the carving of the tunnel. He had a notebook in his hands, doing a little sketching and the like. Nikolai looked over at the man, but after a heartbeat, decided it was a good enough spot for a talk.

  “What is your plan for the day?” Nikolai asked.

  “I can’t say you’re going to be particularly fond of it.”

  He sighed at me.

  “Please, ask me if I am surprised.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Then proceed, your highness.”

  I nodded at him and a smile, catching the reference. “I’m concerned about a few things—”

  “Just a few?”

  “More than a few, okay? Just trying to downplay things ever so much because this is a whole lot of stress I wasn’t really prepared for.”

  “Continue.”

  “We need to get to the other side of this mountain, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re the only person here who’s been on the other side: is it safer there than here?”